The fate of an Indonesian airliner and 102 people on board remains shrouded in confusion after aviation officials retracted reports that the aircraft had been found.

Earlier today, military officials and a spokesman for Adam Air, an Indonesian budget airline, said 90 bodies had been discovered with the wreckage of the Boeing 737-400, which crashed yesterday in heavy rain in the western limits of Indonesia's Sulawesi island.

The news, broken to families waiting at the airport in Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi province, led some to collapse and others to hope that their relatives were among the 12 people not accounted for.

But that anxiety was transformed once again when officials apologised and said that the aircraft was, in fact, still missing and might have crashed into the sea.

"The search and rescue team is still looking for the location," Hatta Radjasa, the Indonesian Transport Minister, told el-Shinta radio, saying that early reports had been based on rumours from local villagers, which turned out to be false. "It has not yet been found."

Rear Commander Eddy Suyanto, one of several officials who said that the aircraft had come down in the mountainous reaches of Polewali, in Sulawesi, said: "We apologize for the news that we released earlier. It was not true."

Rescue teams, battling torrential rain, slippery paths and thick, jungle-covered mountains, suspended the search for the aircraft as darkness fell tonight. They are expected to resume and widen the hunt for the 96 passengers and 6 crew at dawn tomorrow. Three Americans, all from one family, are among those missing, the rest are Indonesian.

Bambang Karnoyudho, the head of Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Board, said that the search would now focus on the last signal from the aircraft picked up by Singaporean authorities, which indicated that the jet was in the sea, about 30km northwest of Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi.

"We will focus our search in that area in the sea and we will try our best to find survivors," he said.

The Adam Air flight, from Indonesia's main island of Java to Sulawesi, ended after the aircraft sent two distress signals midway through its two-hour journey and lost contact with air traffic controllers.

Its disappearance is the latest of a series of disasters, including deadly floods, landslides and maritime accidents, that have struck Indonesia during weeks of heavy seasonal rains and strong winds. A ferry sank in the Java Sea last Friday night, killing at least 400 people.

Adam Air is one of at least a dozen budget airlines to have been formed in Indonesia since 1999, when the industry was deregulated. The country's 17,000 islands present a ready-made need for cheap air travel but the rapid expansion of the field has raised some safety concerns.

Many of the airlines lease planes that are decades old and maintenance is reportedly poor. There have been several deadly crashes in recent years. In September 2005, a Mandala Airlines Boeing 737 crashed after takeoff on Sumatra, killing 143 people.

Ichsan Tatang, Indonesia's top aviation official, said that the plane involved in Monday’s disaster was 17 years old, had flown 45,371 hours and passed its last inspection on December 25. "Everything was in order, the condition of the plane was good," he said, saying it was too early to speculate on the cause of the crash.

The airline has come under fire in the past. Last year, an Adam Air jetliner lost all communication and navigation systems for four hours during a flight between the Indonesian capital Jakarta and Makassar on Sulawesi Island, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing at a small provincial airport

A day later, the plane flew to a regional airport with proper maintenance facilities without being given the go-ahead by aviation authorities, a major violation of national and international safety rules

Adam Air, which began operations in 2003, was founded by Agung Laksono, the speaker of Indonesia’s House of Representatives. It operates 19 Boeing 737s on domestic routes and also flies to Singapore.