Bodies indicate Flight 447 midair breakup

PARIS, June 17 (UPI) -- Medical examiners, speaking in Paris Wednesday, said the condition of bodies pulled from the Atlantic Ocean suggest Air France Flight 447 broke up in midair.

The medical experts said they based their impressions on the multiple fractures they found on the victims' legs, hips and arms, The Daily Telegraph reported. The damage to the bodies and the debris recovered so far would have been much worse if the Airbus A330-200 had slammed into the water intact, they said.

Their comments are in line with initial Brazilian investigators' post-mortem findings that showed no water was found in the victims' lungs, another indication they died before impact with the water, the newspaper said.

The fact that bodies were found more than 50 miles apart was another sign of a midair disintegration, the report said.

The bodies showed no sign of burns, leading experts to lean toward ruling out an explosion on board the doomed jetliner, which went down hundreds of miles off the coast of Brazil June 1 while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board. The bodies of only 50 of the 228 victims have been recovered.

The air crash investigators in Paris said they were "getting closer" to determined what went wrong and asked relatives of the victims to have "a lot of patience."

"Considering all the work that has been done and all we have at our disposal, I think we may be getting a bit closer to our goal," said Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of France's air accident investigation bureau, the BEA.

Though about 400 pieces of wreckage have been found, the voice and data recorder "black boxes" have not, making a determination of the cause of the crash much more difficult.

Investigators are focusing on on-board sensors that may have provided faulty information to the pilot, CNN said. However, terrorism hasn't been eliminated, the cable news station said.

A French news magazine has reported that two passengers had names linked to Islamic terrorists. An official with the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center said the names weren't on any U.S. lists.