My son died in the Air India crash. They sent back the wrong body

Times

2 days ago

Amanda Donaghey stood by the blackened, burnt-out trees, birds still tweeting eerily in their branches, and stared at the wreckage of Air India flight 171. The plane, now twisted pieces of melted metal strewn around a college campus in Ahmedabad, had been carrying her son.
Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek, 39, and his husband, Jamie, 45, had been returning to Britain after celebrating their wedding anniversary celebrations in India when the plane crashed, less than a minute in to the flight. An investigation is currently focused on why the fuel to the engines was cut — possibly by one of the pilots.
Donaghey had known immediately she needed to travel here from her home in France — it was both a grim pilgrimage to the place where her son died and a mother's last duty to bring his remains home.
'Visiting the site and seeing it was something I felt like I had to do. I wanted to understand what had happened,' she said this week.
'I remember all these burnt trees. The trees were scorched black. But there were still birds and squirrels in those trees, which I found quite profound. It was like a bomb site. You would think it was from a war scene, but there were still these small birds twittering,' she recalled.
The crash had been devastating; the aircraft had broken up before erupting in a fireball. She was determined to help find Fiongal's remains and gave blood in the hope of finding a DNA match.
After three days, just as she was losing confidence in the search, Donaghey was told there was a 'match' for her son. It meant she could finally bring his remains back to the UK, where she hoped to be able to lay him to rest next to Jamie, whose body had already been identified and sent home.
'I arrived back in London Gatwick with the assurance that Fiongal was in the casket,' she said.
But just as the family were planning for the funerals of the two men, the police got in touch. The British coroner had run a second DNA test: the remains in Fiongal's coffin were not his. 'It was heartbreaking,' said Donaghey.
'We don't know what poor person is in that casket. This is an appalling thing to have happened.'
And it was not an isolated mistake. Last week, Miten Patel revealed that 'other remains' had been found in the coffin he believed contained the body of his mother, Shobhana, 71, who was killed in the crash alongside his father, Ashok, 74. They were finally able to bury her earlier this week in the UK.
Donaghey has spoken to The Sunday Times as she asks the British and Indian authorities to do whatever is necessary to find the remains of her son and bring him home.
Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek had 'always been a free spirit' with 'a certain charisma that is hard to explain', according to his older brother. Interested in fashion from a young age, he studied at the Royal College of Art and worked as a fashion designer, heading up design houses in London and Asia. Later he delved into spirituality, reiki and yoga, and set up a business in London in 2018, the Wellness Foundry, to 'share my findings, teachings and gifts with others.' He and Jamie married in 2022.
Fiongal and Jamie were among the first victims of the Air India crash to be named. On their last night in India, the couple had posted on social media about their 'magical experience'. Smiling in the airport lounge, they posted another short video just before they boarded the aircraft with the message 'Goodbye India'.
Donaghey, 66, who moved to France from Cambridgeshire 22 years ago, had not immediately realised her son was on the plane. She had heard about the crash before going out for a horse ride, but thought he had flown home two days earlier.
She returned to a call from Fiongal's father. 'He told me the boys were on that plane,' she said. 'And that's when I knew.'
Immediately, she decided to travel to India.
It was a complicated trip from her home in the south of France and she flew out two days later. In Delhi, she boarded a chartered jet provided by Air India and arrived in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, western India, on June 17. She was met by a crisis management team from the British High Commission.
Family members of victims could take a DNA test at the city's Civil Hospital so the remains could begin to be identified. 'I hadn't slept for two or three days,' Donaghey said. 'They gave me the option to go to a hotel and rest but I decided I wanted to go straight to the hospital and get the test done. I remember thinking, 'the sooner I get tested, the sooner I can get the two boys on the plane and bring them home'.'
A DNA sample had already been taken from a family member of Jamie's in the UK and sent to India. Donaghey was taken to the hospital by a female member of the British crisis team and met the helpers, whom she calls 'angels', provided by Air India to support the relatives.
She was taken to a converted schoolroom with bench-style seats, where she filled out paperwork and a doctor took her blood. 'I was told, 'the blood test will be analysed to track down Fiongal and that could take up to 72 hours to happen'.'
Afterwards she checked into a hotel. While she waited for news, a member of the British crisis team took her to the BJ Medical College hostel, which Flight 171 had hit.
Donaghey said: 'It was devastating for the aircraft. Obviously they had a series of cordons and I wasn't allowed to pass the last cordon because the tail of the aircraft was still stuck in one of the buildings and it was dangerous.'
While she was going through her search, Miten Patel was doing what he could to bring home his parents, Ashok, a financial advisor, and Shobhana, a retired microbiologist. Married since 1970s, the couple had travelled to India for a Hindu religious trip known as a yatra, which helps people find peace when they eventually die.
Miten had flown out from the UK within 24 hours with dental records and DNA samples to help with identifying his parents' bodies. 'It was the first thing on my mind: Mum and Dad are coming home,' he said.
While he waited for confirmation of their remains, he was given back some of his parents' belongings from the wreckage — his father's shirt and his mother's swan pendant necklace, which his daughter Amira will now inherit.
On June 20, three days after arriving, Donaghey was told a DNA 'match' for Fiongal had been found.
The next day she met with representatives from the hospital, the British High Commission and an officer from Avon & Somerset police, sent over from the UK as a disaster victim investigator.
'I was told they had found part of Fiongal but not all of him,' Donaghey said. 'I said I wanted to stay until they had finished looking.' By this time Jamie's body had been found. He was returned to the UK in a coffin on June 26.
Jamie had been sitting beside Fiongal, who was in 22A, on the left-hand side of the aircraft. The sole survivor of the crash, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was a few rows in front of them in seat 11A.
Donaghey returned to the crash site a second time. 'I was starting to be told by the emergency workers searching the crash site, 'There is nothing left to find'.'
The families were told that human remains less than 5cm long would not be recovered. Other remains were sent to a pathology lab in India to be tagged and logged. From there, the remains would be transferred to a coffin.
Donaghey then heard from British officials that one of the coffins already returned to the UK had been investigated by a coroner and found to contain the remains of multiple people. This would turn out to be the coffin belonging to Shobhana Patel.
'That was when I was really starting to worry about the recovery process,' Donaghey said.
On June 28, she decided to return home with Fiongal's coffin. Time was of the essence, since conditions at the hospital for preserving remains were not up to British standards. The coffin came with paperwork and Fiongal's hospital DNA reference number: A339.
Her only option was to travel back with his remains on an Air India flight to Gatwick.
Back in Britain, Fiongal's remains were handed over to the senior coroner for Inner West London, Dr Fiona Wilcox. Donaghey returned to Cambridgeshire to be supported by her sister, as well as family liaison officers from Cambridgeshire police.
On July 4, family liaison officers asked Donaghey for a meeting the next day with Fiongal's father, sister and brother.
That was when the officers told them: 'We don't have Fiongal. We have carried out the DNA tests and we do not have Fiongal.'
Donaghey said: 'I had my doubts but to be told that was heartbreaking.'
The families realised their hopes of laying Fiongal and Jamie to rest together were no longer possible.
'We have spent every day since then on the phone to the Foreign Office, trying to get a response on where Fiongal is,' Donaghey said. 'All the time, I feel like I'm just standing on the edge of a black hole thinking, 'Has he been disposed of?'
'We would like to be able to do the rites necessary for Fiongal in order for us to move on as a family. And that is what is missing. We don't know what poor person is in that casket. This is an appalling thing to have happened. And we would now like the British government to do everything in its power to find out, and bring Fiongal home.'
Of the 242 people on Air India Flight 171, 53 were British. Many of them were of Indian heritage and so were buried in India. Only 12 sets of remains were returned to Britain. It is these that would have undergone the second round of DNA testing. The other 10 were all matches.
For Miten the most important thing was to make sure that only his mother's remains were buried. 'There may have been a mistake done. But for religious reasons we need to make sure my mother is my mother and not somebody else's remains,' Miten said. 'Knowing 100 per cent that it is mum is very important to us.' A small comfort was that his father's wedding ring was also finally returned.
'It's a miracle to get it back,' said Miten.
Questions remain over whether the remains of those who were buried in India without a second round of tests were correct.
James Healy-Pratt, an international aviation lawyer and partner with Keystone Law, who is representing 20 of the bereaved families affected by the air disaster, said the families were in contact with Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister's office and David Lammy, the foreign secretary. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, visited Britain last week.
Healy-Pratt said: 'Losing a loved one in an air accident is traumatic in itself. These families deserve answers about how this co-mingling of DNA and misidentification of remains occurred. Discussions are ongoing with the UK police and the Foreign Office.'
A government spokesperson said: 'We understand that this is an extremely distressing time for the families, and our thoughts remain with them. Formal identification of bodies is a matter for the Indian authorities. We continue to liaise with the government of Gujarat and the government of India on behalf of the Inner West London senior coroner to support the coronial process.'