AHMEDABAD: The miracle report of a lone survivor from a London-bound passenger plane that crashed Thursday in the Indian city of Ahmedabad with 242 on board offered a glimmer of hope.
Indian rescue teams with sniffer dogs clawed through smoldering wreckage through the night searching for clues for what had caused the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London’s Gatwick Airport to explode in a blazing fireball soon after takeoff from the western city of Ahmedabad.
Bodies from Air India’s flight 171 were lifted out of the torn fuselage, as well as being pulled out of the charred buildings of the medical staff hostel that the airplane smashed into, killing several there too.
The death toll currently stands at 260, police said.
But hours after police said that there “appears to be no survivor in the crash,” officials reported the initially seemingly impossible account that one man had walked out alive.
“One survivor is confirmed,” Dhananjay Dwivedi, principal secretary of Gujarat state’s health department, told AFP.
The person was being treated in hospital, he added without further details.
India’s Home Minister Amit Shah, who visited the crash site and then the hospital, said he was “pained beyond words by the tragic plane crash” in Ahmedabad, the main city in Gujarat state, where Shah is a lawmaker.
But he also told reporters he had heard the “good news of the survivor” and was speaking to them “after meeting him.”
Indian media widely reported the survivor had been sitting in seat 11A, after videos shared on social media showed a man — in a bloodied t-shirt and limping, but walking toward an ambulance.
He shared a boarding card that named him as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, one of 53 UK citizens on board.
AFP was not able to confirm the reports, but the BBC spoke to his cousin in the city of Leicester, Ajay Valgi, who reported that Ramesh had called his family to say he was “fine.”
Britain’s Press Association news agency also spoke to his brother, Nayan Kumar Ramesh, 27, also in Leicester.
“He said, I have no idea how I exited the plane,” his brother told PA.
But while Ramesh’s reported survival offered a chance of hope, stories also flooded in of heartbreaking loss: elderly parents going to visit children in Britain, or family returning home.
Air India is organizing relief flights — one from the capital New Delhi and another from financial hub Mumbai — to Ahmedabad for “the next of kin of passengers and Air India staff,” the information ministry said in a statement.
They will have to take part in the grim task of identifying the bodies, many of which were reported to have been badly burned.
The plane, which was full of fuel as it took off for a long-haul flight to London, exploded into a burst of orange flame, videos of the crash showed.
Dwivedi, the health official, said DNA collection facilities had been set up at BJ Medical College in Ahmedabad.
“DNA testing arrangements have been made,” he told reporters.
“Families and close relatives of the flight passengers, especially their parents and children, are requested to submit their samples at the location so that the victims can be identified at the earliest.”
