Officials have identified 11 of the 50 bodies recovered from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago, by using fingerprints and dental records.

The bodies were identified as "10 Brazilians and one foreigner," officials in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco said yesterday.

Five of the Brazilians were male, the other five were female and the foreigner was male. The officials, part of a task force that also includes Brazilian police and forensic specialists conducting autoposies in the city of Recife, did not give further details about those identified.

They said the families of the identified Brazilians had been visited personally Friday and Saturday by police officers who broke the news. The embassy of the foreigner who was identified was also notified.

A special morgue in Recife has received 49 of the 50 bodies recovered from the crash site approximately 600 miles off Brazil's northeast coast. The 50th body was due to be delivered by ship today.

There were 228 people from 32 countries onboard the airliner, which went down on June 1 off the coast of Brazil on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The cause of the disaster - the worst in Air France's history – is not known.

Seventy-two French citizens, 59 Brazilians, 26 Germans and passengers from 29 other countries – including five Britons - were on the flight.

Identification was initially being attempted using fingerprints, scars, surgical or dental characteristics, and tattoos on the bodies. If those failed, DNA tests were to be carried out in a Brazilian police laboratory in Brasilia based on samples taken from relatives.

After bodies were identified, they were to be released to the families for burial.

The Brazilian officials said they were still waiting for records and other information to identify bodies of foreigners.

"The lack of pre-mortem data explains the small number foreigners identified," officials said in the statement.

Brazilian authorities leading the search for bodies and debris have fading hopes of finding any more remains. On Saturday, a sophisticated plane with on-board radar that found the first traces of the downed plane was taken off the operation.

A separate French operation looking for the plane's black boxes was continuing, with a French military nuclear submarine scouring the crash zone.

Still missing are the plane's flight data and voice recorders, thought to be deep under water. French-chartered ships are trolling a search area with a radius of 50 miles, pulling US Navy underwater listening devices attached to 19,700 feet of cable. The black boxes send out an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 1.25 miles away.

Officials are racing against the clock to find the equipment as homing beacons are expected to fade within a week.

Brazilian and American officials said that as of Sunday evening no signals from the black boxes had been picked up.

Without the black boxes to help explain what went wrong, the investigation has focused on a flurry of automated messages sent by the plane minutes before it lost contact. One of the messages suggests external speed sensors had iced over, destabilizing the plane's control systems.

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