Jakarta. Search teams have recovered the cockpit voice recorder of the Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet that crashed into the Java Sea near Jakarta more than two months ago, officials said on Monday.

Lt. Col. Agung Nugroho, a spokesman for the Indonesian Navy's Western Fleet Command, told Reuters that a weak signal from the recorder had been detected for several days and that it had been found buried in about 8 meters of mud in waters about 30 meters deep.

"We don't know what damage there is, it has obvious scratches on it," Agung said.

Contact with flight JT-610 was lost 13 minutes after it took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten, on Oct. 29 heading north to Pangkal Pinang in Bangka Belitung. The crash, which killed all 189 people on board, was the world's first of a Boeing 737 MAX jet and the deadliest of 2018.

The cockpit voice recorder is one of the two so-called black boxes crucial for the investigation of a plane crash.

The other black box, the flight data recorder, was recovered three days after the crash.

Investigators brought in a Navy ship last week for a fresh search after a 10-day effort funded by Lion Air failed to find the recorder.

Separately, Col. Johan Wahyudi of the Navy's Frogmen Command (Kopaska) told Metro TV that the recorder had been retrieved and taken aboard the ship.

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) focused on airline maintenance and training, as well as the response of a Boeing anti-stall system and a recently replaced sensor, but did not give a cause for the crash.

Reuters