Rescue teams used drones and rappelled down deep gorges on Tuesday to sift through the charred remains of the Yeti Airlines ATR 72 turboprop, which was carrying 72 people when it crashed near the tourist city of Pokhara on Sunday morning.

“There is no possibility of finding any survivor. We have collected 71 bodies so far. The search for the last one will continue,” Tek Bahadur K.C., a top district official in Pokhara, said on Wednesday as quoted by Reuters.

Identifying bodies and accounting for all 72 people has been difficult because of the state of the remains, said Ajay K.C., a police official at the rescue site.

“Until the hospital tests show all 72 bodies, we’ll continue to search for the last person,” Ajay said.

Search teams found 68 bodies on the day of the crash, and two more were recovered on Monday before the search was called off. One more body had been recovered as of late Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

Teams had diverted the flow of a nearby river to look for bodies, said Gurudutt Ghimire, another official taking part in the search operations.

“There is nothing left there. But the search will continue,” Ghimire said.

On Monday, searchers found the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, both in good condition, a discovery that is likely to help investigators determine what caused the crash.

Because Nepal does not have the facilities to read the so-called black boxes, the devices will be sent wherever the manufacturer recommends.

Hospitals return bodies

Nepali hospital staff began the grim task of handing over the victims’ bodies to their grieving families on Tuesday.

The Yeti Airlines flight carrying 68 passengers and four crew plummeted into a steep gorge, smashed into pieces and burst into flames as it approached the central city of Pokhara on Sunday.

All those onboard, including six children and 15 foreigners, are believed dead.

Rescuers have been working almost around the clock extracting human remains from the gorge, strewn with twisted plane seats and chunks of fuselage and wing.

Seventy bodies had been retrieved by early Tuesday, police official A.K. Chhetri told AFP. Another senior official said the day before that the hope of finding anyone alive was “nil”.

“We retrieved one body last night. But it was three pieces. We are not sure whether it’s three bodies or one body. It will be confirmed only after a DNA test,” Chhetri said.

Drones were being used and the search for the two remaining bodies had been expanded to a radius of 2 to 3 kilometers, he added.

The black boxes from the plane, made by France-based ATR, were handed over to authorities on Monday, said Bikram Raj Gautam, chief of Pokhara International Airport.

Hospital workers in blue-and-white protective suits and masks loaded bodies wrapped in plastic onto army trucks on Tuesday as distraught relatives wept and hugged outside.

The trucks then left for the airport, where the bodies would be airlifted back to the capital Kathmandu.

The ATR 72 was flying from Kathmandu to Pokhara, a gateway for religious pilgrims and trekkers, when it crashed shortly before 11 a.m. (5:15 a.m. GMT).

“I was walking when I heard a loud blast, like a bomb went off,” said witness Arun Tamu, 44, who was around 500 meters away and livestreamed video of the blazing wreckage on social media.

The cause of the crash is not yet known, but a video on social media shows the twin-propeller aircraft banking suddenly and sharply to the left as it nears Pokhara airport, followed by a loud explosion.