The debris of the Indian Air Force’s An-32 aircraft that had gone missing over the Bay of Bengal in July 2016 with 29 passengers and crew on board has been found after over seven years, the defence ministry said on Friday.

Soon after the aircraft went missing, India had launched its biggest search operation to locate the plane. The IAF and the navy had deployed over 24 ships, several planes and a submarine to search for the plane across a wide swathe of the Bay of Bengal. International agencies and satellites were also used in the search.

Sources said the mystery behind the cause of the disappearance of the plane might be solved now. The ministry, however, did not say whether the plane’s black box had been recovered.

The National Institute of Ocean Technology recently deployed an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with deep sea exploration capability at the last known location of the missing An-32, the defence ministry said on Friday.

“The search was conducted at a depth of 3,400m using multiple payloads, including a multi-beam SONAR (sound navigation and ranging), synthetic aperture SONAR and high-resolution photography. Analysis of search images had indicated the presence of debris of a crashed aircraft on the sea bed, approximately 140 nautical miles (around 310km) from the Chennai coast,” the ministry said.

“The search images were scrutinised and found to be conforming with an An-32 aircraft. This discovery at the probable crash site, with no other recorded history of any other missing aircraft report in the same area, points to the debris as possibly belonging to the crashed IAF An-32.”

The IAF’s AN-32 twin-engine aircraft had mysteriously disappeared over the Bay of Bengal on July 22, 2016. The aircraft took off from the Tambaram Air Force Station in Chennai around 8.30am and was supposed to arrive at Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands around 11.30am.

The plane had made its last radio contact with Tambaram at 8.46am, 16 minutes after taking off. The aircraft rapidly lost altitude from 23,000 feet and was off the radar around 9.12am, 280km off the Chennai coast.

The plane was carrying a crew of six and 23 passengers, including four officers. One of the officers was a woman.

The Antonov-32 transport plane from the 33 “Himalayan Geese” squadron based in Sulur, Coimbatore, was on one of the three weekly courier flights to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

On August 1, 2016, it was confirmed that the aircraft had no underwater locator beacon which made search operation for the wreckage of the aircraft extremely difficult. The rescue mission was called off on September 15, 2016, with all the people onboard presumed dead.