"We have found the bodies of the six passengers," Shaho Mohammed Said, a senior official with the Kurdistan administration told AFP.

Said said that wreckage of the business jet that crashed last week was also found near the village of Bushein in Arbat region, some 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the city of Sulaimaniyah.

"We have found two parts of the plane and a bag and our search is continuing in the vicinity of the village of Bushein," he said.

The wreckage and the corpses were discovered by accident by a local shepherd from Bushein as he was tending his flock of sheep in the hilly terrain of the village.

"I was with my animals on a hill-top when I saw parts of the plane and some bodies," a security guard quoted the shepherd Ghaffur Fattah as saying.

At the site of the wreckage, clothes and parts of the plane were scattered around as security guards cordoned off the area.

Iraq had launched a hunt for the German-registered plane in the mountainous terrain of northern Iraq after it went missing Thursday night some 100 kilometres (62 miles) north of Halabja, near the Iranian border.

The twin-engine C501 Cessna jet took off last Tuesday from Munich with five Germans from a Bavarian firm, including the pilot, and an Iraqi, German police said. It stopped in Baku, Azerbaijan, before flying on to northern Iraq.

Sulaimaniyah airport director Kamaran Ahmad Abdallah told AFP on Saturday that the plane's last radio communications with the airport gave no indications of trouble on Thursday night.

Abdallah added US troops were also helping in the search which was badly affected by snowy weather.