Coast guards fished the bodies of 12 men, 21 women and two children from the rising swells, as well as large pieces of wreckage from waters near Penghu island.

Penghu rescue leaders saw little chance that anyone had survived from the Boeing 747-200 with 225 people on board.

Empty yellow body bags were stacked in piles as the first victims to be discovered were placed in a small sports stadium in a local air force base, near the small port.

The Taiwan carrier's flight CI 611 disappeared abruptly from radars on Saturday soon after taking off from Taipei for Hong Kong, leaving mystery in its wake and dealing a new blow to the safety record of China Airlines, which has now suffered four air crashes since 1994.

Distressed relatives were already gathering in Penghu. Brian Yen's cousin was on the plane en route to the Chinese mainland via Hong Kong to visit his girlfriend. "She was pretty upset. She was screaming," Yen said.

The search continued for the crashed plane's two critical black boxes, the robust, on-board monitoring systems which often tell investigators what happened in air disasters.

Speculation of a mid-air explosion grew after farmers in Taiwan's western coastal county of Changhua, about 50 miles northeast of the crash site, found debris from the plane in their fields.

A doctor said that bodies retrieved so far had suffered broken bones, but no burns.

Aviation authorities said the pilot had not issued any distress signals before the aircraft disappeared in clear weather about 20 minutes into the 90-minute journey.

The plane, almost 23 years old and with almost 65,000 flying hours, had already been sold to Orient Thai, a Thai charter carrier, and was due to be delivered on June 20.

Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council declined to speculate on the cause of the crash, and said it had contacted the US National Transportation Safety Board, the Boeing Company, and engine maker Pratt and Whitney.

A Boeing team of investigators was on its way to Taiwan from the United States.

Peter Lok Kung-nam, former director general of Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Department told Reuters: "It is fairly certain the aircraft suddenly broke apart."

"There was absolutely no forewarning, no distress call, not even a secondary radar distress signal, the whole thing must have happened very quickly," he said.

Lok suggested three possible causes: an explosion, sudden de-pressurization which could have knocked the crew out, or the more remote possibility of a collision in the air with another unknown object.

(China Daily May 26, 2002)