WUZHOU, China —

       A Chinese aviation official said Wednesday that one of the two “black box” recorders from the China Eastern plane that crashed earlier this week with 132 people on board has been found in severely damaged condition.

       The device is so damaged that investigators were not able to tell whether it is the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder, said Mao Yanfeng, the director of the accident-investigation division of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. He told a news conference that an all-out effort was being made to find the other black box.

       Recovering the so-called black boxes — which are usually painted orange for visibility — is considered key to figuring out what caused the crash. It wasn’t clear if the damage to the recovered one would limit its usefulness.

       The search for clues to why the commercial jetliner suddenly nosedived into a mountainside in southern China had been suspended earlier Wednesday as rain slickened the debris field and filled the red-dirt gash formed by the plane’s fiery impact.

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       Pieces of wreckage from a crashed China Eastern airliner lie on the mountainside into which the plane nosedived.

       (Zhou Hua / Xinhua News Agency)

       Searchers had used hand tools, drones and sniffer dogs under rainy conditions to comb the heavily forested slopes for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, as well as any human remains and personal effects. Crews also worked to pump water from the pit created when the plane hit the ground, but their efforts were suspended around mid-morning because small landslides were possible on the steep, slick slopes.

       The black box was found in the afternoon. The flight data recorder captures information about the plane’s speed, altitude, direction up or down, pilot actions and performance of all key systems. The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds during the flight, including conversations and background engine noise.

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       Relatives of passengers began arriving Wednesday at the gate to Lu village, just outside the crash zone, where they, along with reporters on the scene, were stopped by police and officials who used opened umbrellas to block the view beyond.

       One woman was overheard saying that her husband, the father of their two children, had been on board the flight.

       “I’m just going in there to take a look. Am I breaking the law?” she said. The woman and a companion were then escorted away, and reporters were told to stop filming.

       Another man, who gave just his surname, Ding, said his sister-in-law had been on the plane. He said he hoped to visit the site but had been told little by the authorities.

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       “We’re just coming here to have a look,” he said, adding that his “heart sank all of a sudden” when he heard about the crash. He, too, was escorted away.

       China Eastern Flight 5735 was carrying 123 passengers and nine crew from Kunming in Yunnan province, in southwestern China, to Guangzhou, an industrial center on the southeastern coast, when it crashed Monday afternoon outside the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi province. All 132 people on board are presumed killed.

       Investigators say it is too early to speculate on the cause. The plane went into an unexplained dive an hour after departure and stopped transmitting data 96 seconds into the fall.

       An air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply but got no reply, said Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, at a Tuesday evening news conference.

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       “As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors,” Zhu said. “The public security department has taken control of the site.”

       China Eastern is headquartered in Shanghai and is one of China’s three largest carriers, with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s. China’s Transport Ministry said China Eastern has grounded all of its 737-800s, a move that could further disrupt domestic air travel already somewhat curtailed because of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in China since the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, in central China, in early 2020.

       The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has a well-established safety record. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

       Monday’s crash was China’s worst in more than a decade. In August 2010, an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire. It carried 96 people, 44 of whom died. Investigators blamed pilot error.