Air India: Lone survivor lays brother to rest at emotional funeral

BBC News

5 hours ago

The British man who was the sole survivor of last week's Air India plane crash has helped lay his brother to rest at a funeral in western India.Vishwashkumar Ramesh's brother Ajay was also on the ill-fated flight but did not survive the tragedy.A visibly upset Ramesh was one of the pall bearers who carried his brother's coffin to the crematorium in the town of Diu, his arm and face still covered in white bandages. He's spent most of the past five days in hospital.The London-bound Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed seconds after taking off on Thursday from the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. At least 270 people were killed, most of them passengers.
Mr Ramesh's mother walked with the coffin in a blue sari along with other mourners, as he held it on his right shoulder.Several people from the town - which lost 14 other people to the crash - came out for the funeral even as the rain lashed the procession.No one is clear how Mr Ramesh managed to survive. He even tried to go back to the blazing plane to search for his brother, one of the first responders at the scene told the BBC. In a new video that emerged earlier this week, ambulance driver Satinder Singh Sandhu is the man seen guiding Mr Ramesh to safety as he walks out of the crash site with flames and thick smoke billowing into the air behind him.
Mr Sandhu, a supervisor with the emergency ambulance services in Ahmedabad, says he had no idea who he was helping, or that Mr Ramesh had escaped from the plane. He only found out later that day on the news that the man was the sole survivor of the crash. Vishwashkumar Ramesh, 40, was in seat 11A on the flight. His brother is reported to have been sitting a few seats away.All other passengers and crew were killed and nearly 30 people also died on the ground after the plane hurtled down and crashed into a doctor's hostel. But Mr Ramesh miraculously survived, managing to get out of the wreckage through an opening in the fuselage.The new video shows Mr Sandhu, who's wearing a blue turban, walk up to Mr Ramesh and guide him to safety.Mr Sandhu said he was having lunch with his colleagues when he first noticed a "massive fire with thick smoke rising into the sky"."At first, we thought it might be a car accident or a gas cylinder blast. Soon, we learned it was a plane crash. I immediately instructed my team to bring an ambulance, and rushed to the site."
Speaking to BBC Gujarati, Mr Sandhu said that he was just trying to do his job. In his decades-long career, he said he had encountered many challenging situations.But what surprised him that day was how Mr Ramesh, after being rescued, kept trying to go back to the site of the crash."He had no idea what he was doing. He kept going in and out of the complex. We told him to stop, and dragged him away to an ambulance so that he could receive medical care," Mr Sandhu said."That's when he said to me that his relative was trapped inside and he wanted to go save him. We did not speak a word after that."Mr Ramesh later told India's DD News that he was trying to go look for Ajay.
At the scene, Mr Sandhu spotted a security guard who seemed to have been injured in the impact. His clothes were partially burnt and Mr Sandhu first helped him."I also saw a woman. She was screaming in horror. Her son who ran a tea stall had been killed in the crash."Moments later he saw Mr Ramesh emerge from the crash site in a white shirt.He had injuries on his face and burns on his arms and looked visibly upset, Mr Sandhu said."At that point, we had no idea who the injured man was. I thought he was one of the doctors who lived in the college. Later, when we saw the news, we realised he was the lone survivor of the crash."Chirag, a member of Mr Sandhu's ambulance team, told PTI news agency that Mr Ramesh was telling someone on a video call that his relatives were at the crash site.The first responders treated him for his injuries and rushed him to the trauma centre of a hospital nearby.In his interview with DD News, Mr Ramesh had said he could not believe that he came out of the wreckage alive."For a moment, I felt like I was going to die too, but when I opened my eyes and looked around, I realised I was alive."I still can't believe how I survived. I walked out of the rubble."The cause of the crash is not yet known. Officials are trying to decode the cockpit voice and flight data recorders - collectively known as the black box - recovered from the wreckage to piece together what happened.Additional reporting by Zoya Mateen in DelhiFollow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.