NEW DELHI: Indian investigators are not ruling out sabotage in connection with the crash of the London-bound Air India flight that killed at least 260 people earlier this month, a minister has said, as officials began examining the plane’s black box.
The London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed less than a minute after taking off from Ahmedabad airport in the western Indian state of Gujarat on June 12.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation has confirmed that investigators had recovered from the crash site both components of the black box — the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder — and brought them to the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau in New Delhi last week.
“Right now, the investigation is ongoing. But this is a rare incident. It has never happened before that both the engines got shut at the same time,” Murlidhar Mohol, minister of state for civil aviation, told the media on Saturday evening.
He did not dismiss the possibility of “sabotage” when New Delhi Television asked if it was being considered.
“We are investigating it from all angles to find out what was the cause of this accident,” Mohol said.
“We are looking at CCTV footage of Ahmedabad over the last 30 days, (of) those who came, those who went through screening, all the passports — we are probing it from all the angles.”
Data from the black box has been downloaded and the final report was expected in three months.
“Was it due to a bird strike, was there some technical issue with the engine, was there a fuel-supply issue, why both the engines shut down at the same time ... we will know only after the investigation,” the minister said, adding that the black box would be investigated domestically and “there is no need to send it abroad.”
The Air India flight was carrying 242 people — 230 passengers, two pilots and 10 crew members. Only one person, a British national sitting in an emergency exit seat, survived the crash.
It was initially unclear how many more people were killed on the ground as the aircraft fell on the B. J. Medical College and hostel for students and resident doctors of the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital.
After two weeks of DNA testing, authorities in Gujarat state announced on Saturday the final toll, saying they had recovered 260 bodies.
The number is lower than the initial number reported by the Junior Doctors’ Association at the B. J. College, whose president told the media a day after the crash that the hospital had received the bodies of 270 victims.
