Lao Airlines crash's smallest victim pulled from river of tears Rescue workers load the recovered body of a passenger into an ambulance at Pakse, Laos, in the wake of the Lao Airlines crash. Picture: Graham Crouch Source: TheAustralian ALONE in his rough-hewn coffin, the tiny body of 17-month-old Manfred Rhodes was the only one yesterday of six Australians yet to be identified from the Lao Airlines plane which plunged into a river Wednesday afternoon, killing all 49 people on board. As the families of the remaining missing Australians -- Gavin, Phoumalaysy (Lea) and three-year-old Jadesude Rhodes from Sydney, and northern NSW father and son Michael and Gordon Creighton -- struggled to come to terms with their loss, Laos government officials admitted they lacked the equipment and manpower to recover the plane and the bodies lost. Dozens of locals -- some mourners, many curious onlookers -- lined the banks of the Sedon river yesterday, a fast-flowing tributary of the Mekong, to watch a team of 30 Thai and 20 Laotian divers drag it for bodies and plane parts. Several of the divers complained they had no sonar to help locate the black box of the plane, which witnesses said appeared to have lost the use of one propeller as it careened into a steep riverbank in bad weather, then crashed into the murky water and sank. "It's very difficult to find (bodies) underwater," Lao Aviation and Public Works minister Sommad Pholsena admitted to reporters at the crash site yesterday morning. If we could find (the plane) we would have found it already. We're working very hard with our Thai friends. Within hours at least 50 people, many wielding phone cameras, crowded the opposite riverbank as the remains of two passengers were pulled from the river, wrapped in plastic sheeting by medical workers in masks and gently loaded into an ambulance. There were gasps but no one cried. For Buddhist Laotians such outpouring of grief is believed to hamper the body's journey to peace. By early afternoon part of the fuselage and five more bodies had been recovered -- bringing the total number to about 24 -- but the work was slow and increasingly difficult. At least four passengers, including Manfred Rhodes, were found 30km downstream of the crash site along with parts of the fuselage from the brand new French-Italian built ATR 73-600 Air Lao aircraft, delivered only last March and which had flown less than 700 hours. A Lao Airline official overseeing an emergency administration centre, where employees fielded calls from desperate loved ones and compiled files of the missing and recovered, said the biggest problem facing rescuers was the river's current after more than a month of relentless rain. "The river is flowing quite fast, which is why the divers can't dive too deep," she said. "Ice coffins were on their way from Thailand," she added -- the border is just 45 km from Pakse by road -- in order to try to preserve the bodies of those recovered while workers continue their search for relatives. At the makeshift morgue in Pakse town -- an open-air Chinese temple opposite a car dealership -- mourners laid offerings of bread, flowers and water by the head of eight coffins lined up neatly on the tiles. To the left of them stood the futile remnants of abandoned blood bags on IV stands. To the right, 10 more empty coffins stacked neatly. By mid-afternoon they were filling up fast, though there were no Australians among those recovered bodies. In the capital Vientiane, Australian lawyer and president of the Australian New Zealand Business Association Brennan Cole said the tight-knit expatriate community was in shock over the death of Michael Creighton, a 42-year-old de-mining specialist with Norwegian People's Aid. "This tragedy has really hit close to home," Mr Cole said. Mr Creighton and his retired schoolteacher father were headed to Pakse to see some of the mine action projects he oversaw as operations manager for the humanitarian organisation. NPA country director and good friend Atle Karlsen told The Weekend Australian Mr Creighton's death meant the loss of a world expert in de-mining, a man who had plunged headlong over 20-years into some of the globe's greatest misery spots -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia. We were very lucky to have him here. This is a field you enter not just for the work and certainly not for the money but because you're interested in helping people," Mr Karlsen said. He had worked for many others (the Australian Army, private de-mining companies, the UN and Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining) but he really wanted to work for an NGO. That was what he was like. He really wanted to do good, and he had the opportunity to do that. Mr Creighton's fiancee Melanie Fuller, the executive administrator of ANZBA in Vientiane, was being comforted by friends and Australian consular staff yesterday. The brother of Lea Rhodes, Pousay, said the entire family was devastated by the loss of a couple who had lived for each other and their children, and were now praying for the recovery of the remaining bodies. The Rhodes family had been flying to Pakse to visit their Laotian relatives in nearby Attapeu Province. The couple had met six years ago when Lea had moved to Australia to continue her English studies, and had flown back to Laos for the family's blessing before they married. France's accident investigation agency said in a statement that it was sending four investigators, along with technical advisers from ATR, to help Laos with the probe into the cause of the crash.