Air India dead strewn across filthy Indian morgue
A video obtained by relatives and seen by The Telegraph appears to show charred and torn victims of the Flight AI171 disaster lying across the floor in a filthy pink walled room at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad.
In the graphic footage, which The Telegraph is not publishing, limbs can be seen on a tiled floor next to barred windows and burnt bodies uncovered among dirty sheets.
Three days on, families are still trying to identify victims of the crash. Relatives of the deceased told The Telegraph that less than 40 of the more than 270 total dead had been confirmed so far through DNA testing.
As investigators try to find the cause, relatives of the 53 British people who died are scrambling to reach the western Indian city and identify their loved ones before repatriating them to the UK.
Among those looking for closure was Abdullah Nanabawa, the father of Akeel Nanabawa, who died alongside his wife, Hannaa Vorajee, and their four-year-old daughter, Sara.
Mr Nanabawa, who grew up in Newport, South Wales, was returning to his home in Gloucestershire with his wife and child.
His father has now been provided with the horrific footage of inside the morgue and said he was asking to see his son's body.
'This is the situation inside,' he told The Telegraph. 'They won't let me inside the mortuary. I'm his father. It's my right to see him, no matter how broken, how burned. I have to face this. I should have died instead, he was taken away.'
As he smoked a cigarette every 10 minutes and walked around in slippers outside the Civil Hospital, waiting for answers, he added: 'Release the bodies of my relatives. This is unfair.'
None of the British relatives flying in from the UK appear to have reached the hospital yet.
Indian relatives of British crash victims, some of whom drove through the night for up to 12 hours, told The Telegraph that they have been left waiting outside the hospital for days in unbearable heat, 'begging' for answers.
Hannaa Vorajee's cousin, Ameen Siddiqui, 28, from Surat in Gujarat, said their home had been 'alive with laughter' this Eid, reunited with their British relatives.
'We're invisible'
'None of us imagined it would be our last Eid together or that the next time we'd gather, it would be to wait outside a hospital, begging for answers,' he said.
'We've been coming to the hospital every day since the crash, morning till midnight, and no one tells us anything. It's as if we're invisible. They won't even confirm if their bodies are inside,' he said.
Officials, he said, 'keep repeating, 'Wait 72 hours'.'
'Seventy-two hours for what? We're not even allowed past the gate. Even the people at the helpline don't answer our queries. There is a wall of silence while our dead lie inside, unacknowledged.
'The worst pain is not just that we lost them, but that we can't even see them, can't say goodbye, can't know. For three nights, we've stood here in the heat, the dust,' he said.
On Saturday evening the first British relatives are expected to begin arriving after finally securing visas and flights.
However, Indian family members say they don't know how to prepare them for the horror and uncertainty that awaits.
Mr Siddiqui told The Telegraph: 'My aunt Yasmin, Hanna's mother, and her son Muhammad are flying in from London today [Saturday]. What will we say to them? That we don't even know if their bodies still exist? That their granddaughter may never be buried properly? We feel abandoned.'
Imtiyaz Ali Syed, 42, whose brother Javed, 37, died with his wife Mariam and their children Zayn, six, and Amani, four, has been at the hospital since 2am on Friday, having driven through the night when news broke.
The family, who live in west London, had been in India on a long-awaited Eid holiday to spend time with Javed's ailing mother. Javed was a hotel manager, Mariam worked as a brand ambassador at Harrods.
'This was Javed's second visit home in over a decade,' Mr Syed said.
'He had worked hard in London all these years and finally planned this trip just to be with the family, to celebrate Eid together like old times. We hadn't had a full family gathering in years.'
Mr Syed said he 'could not gather the courage' to enter the mortuary.
'They said the bodies were burnt beyond recognition. What would I see? What could I possibly recognise? That image would stay with me forever. I couldn't bear it. No one can imagine our pain.
'We saw them off happily, then they were killed and we won't get closure. People die and families at least find closure by burying their bodies with a face. We can't see their faces anymore.'
'We've lost everything in a moment, because of someone else's negligence,' he said.
'My nephew Zain was six, my niece Amani just four. We don't even know if their bodies remain. How can a family process grief when there's not even a face left to say goodbye to?'
On Friday The Telegraph reported that Mariam's older sister, Sadaf Javed, 48, was desperate to travel from her home in west London to Ahmedabad. Today her sister-in-law, Yasmine Hassan, from west London, confirmed that Mrs Javed had finally obtained a visa and is now on standby for flights.
'This is her baby sister, her husband, and her sister's two children,' Mrs Hassan said. 'Those two children see her like a second mum. She just wants to be there.'
Investigators are continuing to search the crash site in the Meghaninagar district 1.5km metres from the end of the runway at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner headed for London Gatwick crashed into a hostel where medical students and their families were living just 30 seconds after take-off.
India has ordered urgent safety tests of Boeing 787s and the flight data recorder, known as the black box, had been recovered and was being looked into by investigators.
Only one of the 241 people on board survived the crash, the sole surviving passenger, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, from Leicester, who was sitting in seat 11A.
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28 minutes ago
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My son died in the Air India crash. They sent back the wrong body
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