Air India crash: British families ‘receive wrong remains' of victims
Air India crash
have reportedly been sent the wrong bodies of their loved ones, said a
Times of India
report quoting the Daily Mail.
Two such instances have come up so far where grieving families learnt that some of their loved ones' remains were misidentified before being returned to the UK.
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In one instance, a family was apparently forced to cancel funeral arrangements upon discovering that the coffin they received held the body of an unidentified passenger, not their relative, as per the Daily Mail.
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In another incident, the 'commingled' remains of multiple crash victims were reportedly mistakenly placed in a single casket. The errors came to light after Dr Fiona Wilcox, an inner west London coroner, began verifying the identities of the repatriated British nationals after cross-checking their DNA with samples provided by families.
'I've been sitting down in the homes of these lovely British families over the last month, and the first thing they want is their loved ones back,' said Healy-Pratt, who is responsible for investigating and uncovering the complete circumstances surrounding the tragedy, reported the Daily Mail.
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'But some of them have got the wrong remains and they are clearly distraught over this. It has been going on for a couple of weeks (and) I think these families deserve an explanation,' he added.
"Family X have no-one to bury because it was the wrong person in their casket. And if isn't their relative, the question is, who is it in that coffin? Presumably it's another passenger and their relatives have been given the wrong remains," Pratt said, referring to the family who had to cancel funeral arrangements.
The family who received the 'commingled' remains was eventually able to have them separated and proceed with a funeral service, reports the Daily Mail.
Although the remains of nearly all the victims are believed to have been recovered within the three days of the incident, the extreme 1500°C heat during the crash left most bodies severely burnt and unrecognizable. Others were mutilated or fragmented by the violent impact of the crash.
This meant that a lot of the families received the remains of their near ones in plastic containers, instead of coffins from the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, reports the Daily Mail.
In the most severe cases, matches were made using dental records to aid in the identification process.
After the crash, nearly 40 officials from across Gujarat, including teams from the Directorate of Forensic Science (DFS) and the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU), worked to match DNA samples.
More than 50 experts from departments including Forensic Medicine, Community Medicine, Microbiology, Biochemistry, and Pathology were involved in the testing. At BJ Medical College, rigorous blood sample collection was carried out.
Out of the 261 lives lost in Air India Flight 171 that crashed just seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to London's Gatwick airport, 52 were British citizens.
(With TOI inputs)
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