AHMEDABAD, India: Grieving families were due to hold funerals in India on Sunday for their relatives who were among at least 279 killed in one of the world’s worst plane crashes in decades.
Health officials have begun handing over the first passenger bodies identified through DNA testing, delivering them in white coffins in the western city of Ahmedabad.
“My heart is very heavy, how do we give the bodies to the families?” said Tushar Leuva, an NGO worker who has been helping with the recovery efforts.
There was just one survivor out of 242 passengers and crew on board the Air India jet when it crashed Thursday into a residential area of Ahmedabad, killing at least 38 people on the ground.
“How will they react when they open the gate? But we’ll have to do it,” Leuva said at the mortuary on Saturday.
One victim’s relative who did not want to be named said they had been instructed not to open the coffin when they receive it.
Witnesses reported seeing badly burnt bodies and scattered remains.
The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner erupted into a fireball when it went down moments after takeoff, smashing into buildings used by medical staff.
Mourning relatives have been providing DNA samples to be matched with passengers, with 31 identified as of Sunday morning.
“This is a meticulous and slow process, so it has to be done meticulously only,” Rajnish Patel, a doctor at Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, said late Saturday.
The majority of those injured on the ground have been discharged, he added, with one or two remaining in critical care.
Indian authorities are yet to detail the cause of the disaster and have ordered inspections of Air India’s Dreamliners.
Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said Saturday he hoped decoding the recovered black box, or flight data recorder, would “give an in-depth insight” into what went wrong.
Just one person miraculously escaped the wreckage, British citizen Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, whose brother was also on the flight.
Air India said there were 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese and a Canadian on board the flight, as well as 12 crew members.
Among the passengers was a father of two young girls, Arjun Patoliya, who had traveled to India to scatter his wife’s ashes following her death weeks earlier.
“I really hope that those girls will be looked after by all of us,” said Anjana Patel, the mayor of London’s Harrow borough where some of the victims lived.
“We don’t have any words to describe how the families and friends must be feeling,” she added.
While communities were in mourning, one woman recounted how she survived only by arriving late at the airport.
“The airline staff had already closed the check-in,” said 28-year-old Bhoomi Chauhan.
“At that moment, I kept thinking that if only we had left a little earlier, we wouldn’t have missed our flight,” she told the Press Trust of India news agency.
