PARIS - French investigators said on Sunday they had detected the signal from the flight recorders from a Yemeni jet that crashed last week with more than 150 people on board.

The news came after the Yemeni transport ministry said on Saturday that search crews had located a large piece of debris from the jet, which crashed into the Indian Ocean off the Comoros islands on June 30.

France's BEA air accident board said in a statement that it could confirm that the signal of two acoustic beacons were located this morning following underwater searches to find the recorders of flight IY 626.

The sole known survivor of the crash was a 14-year-old girl. The other 152 people on board are believed to have died.

The plane plunged into the sea as it came in to land at Moroni, the capital of the formerly French-ruled Comoros archipelago, which comprises three islands off mainland east Africa and northwest of Madagascar.

The aircraft had taken off from the Yemeni capital Sanaa, but many of the passengers had come from France aboard an Airbus A330 which flew the Paris-Marseille-Yemen leg of the flight.

(Reporting by Jean-Baptiste Vey; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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