Black boxes from South Korea plane crash failed to record final four minutes

Rescue workers at the site of the crash (Ahn Young-joon/AP)

The black boxes of a Boeing passenger plane that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident, officials said on Saturday, possibly complicating investigations into the cause of the disaster that killed 179 people.

After analysing the devices, the US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped working about four minutes before the crash, the South Korean Transportation Ministry said.