The Yemeni committee overseeing the investigation of last week's Yemenia 626 crash said in a statement that search and rescue teams in Comoros received a report from Tanzanian authorities informing them that bodies of the victims of the crash and some wreckage were located off the shores of Tanzania, some 370 miles (595 kilometers) away from Comoros.

The committee did not say how the bodies had been identified, give details about the debris or elaborate further. There have previously been several false reports about the recovery of bodies and of survivors.

Officials say they hope locating the plane's black boxes will assist them to find the remains of the plane and passengers. The search has been narrowed down to an area 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter, said Ali Abou Abasse, a senior Comoran police officer coordinating the search and rescue site at the coastal town of Mistamiouli.

Investigators have concluded that the black boxes from the plane are too deep to be reached by divers, a French official said. A French submarine picked up signals from the plane's two black boxes on Sunday but no one has yet located the boxes, which contain the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

The French official, speaking from a crisis unit set up at the French embassy in Comoros after the crash, said two teams of investigators from the French navy and the French aviation agency BEA were trying to determine the exact zone where the black boxes can be found.