Officials in Indonesia say they have found the “black box” voice recorder from a Lion Air flight which crashed into the sea off Jakarta in October.

All 189 people on board died when Flight JT610 fell into the sea shortly after taking off for the short journey to Pangkal Pinang.

The pilot had asked air traffic control for permission to turn back to the airport but then contact was lost.

Investigators say the plane had encountered technical problems.

The main body of the aircraft has never been found.

Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of Indonesia’s transport safety committee (KNKT), was quoted by Reuters as saying that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) had been found “but we have not received information of the location yet”.

Mr Satmiko told AFP that the voice recorder was found at around 09:00 local time (02:00 GMT).

Indonesia’s Navy spokesman Agung Nugroho was quoted in local media as saying the recorder was found 8m deep (26ft) under mud on the sea floor.

Listening to the last conversations between the pilots and ground control on the CVR should help investigators to finish piecing together what went wrong in the short flight.

The plane’s flight data recorder was found last November, buried in debris on the floor of the Java Sea.

Officials had said then that it could take up to six months to analyse data from the black boxes.