A year after Air India crash, families still fighting to identify victims' remains
One year after the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad that killed 260 people, some families are still waiting for answers about the identification of their loved ones' remains, including cases where remains were mixed up.
A year ago, on 12 June, an Air India flight crashed just 32 seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people – 241 on the plane and 19 on the ground. One passenger miraculously survived. It remains one of the worst aviation accidents in India's history.
Miten Patel, whose parents Ashok and Shobhana Patel died in the crash, recounts the long and painful battle to identify their remains. Four days after the crash, he received a call from police in London. A CT scan had revealed that his mother's casket also contained the remains of someone else. Police asked him not to tell anyone, even his family, for weeks. Further testing showed that his mother's remains had been mixed with those of an unidentified man. The Patel family waited another month before they could cremate her remains, postponing Ashok's last rites so they could be done together.
UK Coroner Fiona Wilcox said this week that an inquest has been opened into the death of the unidentified man, whose palm prints and DNA were sent to India, but his name has not been confirmed. She noted it was "very unusual" to open inquests nearly a year after death.
Emergency workers at the crash site faced immense challenges. According to India's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), 90% of the bodies were severely charred, and "extreme thermal damage destroyed fingerprints, facial features and other visual identifiers". Independent forensic expert Dr Deepak Venkatesh said the scale of the disaster made identification even harder. The NDMA has since drawn lessons from the crash and used it as a case study in new identification guidelines issued in January.
There is at least one other case in the UK where a family received the wrong remains. Amanda Donaghey received the remains of a 70-year-old Indian woman, believing they were her son's. She is still searching for her son's remains.
Lawyer James Healey-Pratt, representing both families, said that while the scale of the disaster created identification challenges, "there still needs to be transparency and accountability, because the families deserve it". He added that no one in a position of authority in India has accepted responsibility. The BBC contacted the Indian foreign ministry, the hospital responsible for identification, and the UK foreign office but received no responses.
Miten Patel continues the fight. "I don't want to die and meet my parents up there and they… I want them to say to me, Beta (son), we are so proud of you. You did everything you could after we went."
