Karachi, May 29 (IANS): The cockpit voice recorder of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane which crashed in Karachi on May 22 killing 97 people, has been found in the wreckage, the media reported on Friday.

"The search resumed this morning and the voice recorder was found buried in the debris," The Express Tribune quoted PIA spokesman Abdullah H Khan as saying in a statement on Thursday.

"The cockpit voice recorder recovery will help a lot in the investigation."

The flight data recorder had already been found.

Officials and Airbus investigators are collecting evidence at the site as they try to determine the cause of the country's worst airline disaster in years.

French investigators from the BEA – the French air safety investigation authority for civil aviation – have joined the Pakistan-led probe because the 15-year-old Airbus 320 jet was designed in France.

The BEA said in a statement the two recorders would be examined at its laboratory just outside Paris.

It issued a photograph of one of them on Twitter showing that it appeared to be intact inside its crash-resistant shell and metal base.

The plane's CFM56 engines are expected to be a focus of the investigation after the pilot reported that both had failed shortly after the plane made an initial, unsuccessful attempt to land at Karachi's Jinnah International Airport.

The plane crashed into the city's densely-populated Model Colony about a kilometre short of the runway as it was making a second attempt to land. Two people on board survived.