KEY POINTS:
JAKARTA - The wreckage of a missing Indonesian airliner has been spotted in a mountainous region, reports say.
Rescue efforts had been focussed on Sulawesi island after an Adam Air Boeing 737-400 plane went missing with 96 passengers and six crew on board.
There was no immediate word on survivors after the wreckage was seen, AP news agency reported.
Contact with the plane was lost on Monday when it was at an altitude of 35,000 feet, about an hour before it was due to land in Manado in North Sulawesi, said Tatang Ikhsan, director general at the transport ministry.
Ikhsan said on Elshinta radio the flight had originated in Jakarta with a stop in Surabaya on Java island. It had left Surabaya at 1pm (7pm NZT) and had been scheduled to land just over two hours later in Manado.
At a news conference late on Monday, he said a Singapore satellite had picked up a distress signal from a plane 83 nautical miles northwest of Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province, 1,400km east of Jakarta.
"We call on other flights which crossed this route to provide information on any distress signal," he said.
Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa said the plane had been sighted above the Mamuju forest on Sulawesi.
"(It was) preliminary information from a plane flying above it. It will be the first clue for SAR (Search and Rescue) to move to the area," he told Elshinta radio, adding that rescuers had already been ordered to go.
"Let's hope it made an emergency landing," he said.
The transport ministry's Ikhsan said the plane was airworthy and last serviced in December 2005. It has 45,371 flying hours.
"The weather conditions all over our country are not very good. We have notified all airlines... All flights should have received complete information," he said.
Much of Indonesia was cloudy with rainfall on Monday.
Adam Air, one of about a dozen budget airlines in the world's fourth most populous nation, operates 19 Boeing 737 jets. It serves dozens of domestic routes in Indonesia and also flies to Singapore.
- REUTERS
