Mother of British victim of Air India crash left ‘heartbroken' by casket error

The Guardian

13 hours ago

The mother of one of the British victims of the Air India crash says her family is 'heartbroken' after the wrong remains were sent home in his casket.
Air India's London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a medical college hostel seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad on 12 June, killing 241 people on board.
The dead included 52 British nationals, making it one of the deadliest plane crashes in terms of the number of UK fatalities.
Among the British victims were Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek, 39, and his husband Jamie, 45, who were returning to Britain after celebrating their wedding anniversary in India.
Greenlaw-Meek's mother, Amanda Donaghey, flew to India to find her son's remains, providing a DNA sample at Ahmedabad's civil hospital to help the identification process.
A match was made on 20 June and she returned to the UK with Greenlaw-Meek's coffin.
But on 5 July, police told Donaghey that DNA tests carried out in the UK showed her son's remains were not in the coffin.
'We don't know what poor person is in that casket,' she told The Sunday Times. 'I had my doubts but to be told that was heartbreaking. This is an appalling thing to have happened.'
The revelation emerged as the families of Greenlaw-Meek and his husband prepared to bury the couple together.
Donaghey urged the UK government to 'do everything in its power' to find out what happened to his remains 'and bring Fiongal home.'
Lawyers for a number of the British victims said last week that at least two of the 12 caskets returned to the UK contained misidentified remains.
James Healy-Pratt, whose firm Keystone Law is representing families of crash victims, said: 'We know that 12 caskets were repatriated from India to the UK. Of those 12, two had been mishandled, misidentified.
'And so if you extrapolate that sample, you're looking at 40 mishandled remains out of 240. That's a very large number, but we simply don't know.'
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Healy-Pratt said families were asking the Foreign Office and Keir Starmer, the prime minister, to intervene because the Indian authorities had 'not been transparent or helpful'.
'The families are waiting to hear, first thing next week, about what actions are really being done in India to provide some degree of assurance,' he told Times Radio.
The coffin of 71-year-old Shobhana Patel, another British victim, is said to have contained the remains of several people. She died with her husband Ashok, 74, as they returned to the UK from a Hindu religious trip.
Their son, Miten Patel, told the Sunday Times: 'There may have been a mistake. But for religious reasons we need to make sure my mother is my mother and not somebody else's remains. Knowing 100% that it is my mum is very important to us.'
A preliminary report found the plane's fuel switches had been moved to cut-off, deepening the mystery of what happened and leaving families distressed and seeking answers.