Wrong place, wrong time: Filmmaker's life ends in Ahmedabad Air India inferno
Ahmedabad:
Mahesh Kalavadia
, a 35-year-old Gujarati film producer and director, left his house in Naroda for Shahibaug on his scooter on the afternoon of June 12. He did not return.
Anxious, his family filed a missing complaint with the police. No one expected him to be in the area where the London-bound Air India flight crashed the same day. After all, Shahibaug is about 9 km from Meghani Nagar, the site of the plane crash.
With all the missing complaints coming over, the police requested the family to provide their DNA sample for a worst-case scenario. The sample matched one of the burnt down bodies recovered from the crash site. Kalavadia indeed was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But his family could not accept it.
As the police went on to look for more, they came across a charred scooter and retrieved its engine and chassis numbers which they asked the family to match with that of Kalavadia. They too matched. "Accepting such a loss for any family is incredibly difficult," says Kanan Desai, deputy Commissioner of police, Zone 4, Ahmedabad. "So we produced all the evidence other than the DNA report, including CCTV footage of the nearby area and the engine number and so on."
The family performed his last rites at the
Naroda crematorium
on Friday morning.
Sitting by the
Civil Hospital morgue
a day after the crash, Suresh Patni, an auto driver, had told ET how his son, Akash, who was at a tea stall near the crash site perished in the fire that engulfed the area. Two others who stopped by on a scooter for a cup of tea were also caught in the fire. Kalavadia is believed to be one of those two men on the scooter.
As on Friday, more than 231 DNA profiles of the crash victims have been matched. Authorities have so far contacted 220 families and handed over the bodies of 210 victims: 155 Indians, 36 Brits, seven Portuguese, a Canadian and another 11 who were not passengers of the plane. Two people died during treatment.
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