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Ahmedabad plane crash: 259 bodies, including 19 ground casualties, identified; remains of 256 handed over to families
After over 11 days of the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad, 259 bodies have been identified by Monday. Sources told The Indian Express that only one Indian male passenger's remains were yet to be confirmed by DNA profiling.
Of these 259 identified bodies, 256 have been handed over to families so far, said Dr Rakesh Joshi, the Medical Superintendent of Ahmedabad Civil Hospital.
Dr Joshi said of the 259 bodies, 253 were identified through DNA analysis and six by facial recognition. He declined to offer an official death toll, stating that the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) process was underway.
Dr Joshi said that of the 259 bodies that had been identified by June 23 evening, 253 — including 240 from the aircraft and 13 on ground — had been identified through DNA profiling. Bodies of six people – all ground casualties – had been identified by their faces.
Sources told The Indian Express that only one body, that of an Indian male passenger who was aboard the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that crashed on June 12, was yet to be identified, even as the forensic experts had exhausted all the 318 samples from the remains found at the crash site in Meghaninagar area of Ahmedabad.
This is also likely the final death toll because of the process of elimination, the sources added.
If 240 bodies of passengers and crew had been identified from the aircraft, this would mean that only one body remained to be identified. The plane crash had only one survivor – Viswash Kumar Ramesh – while the rest 241 passengers died in the tragedy.
Jaypalsingh Rathore, the Additional Commissioner of Police for Sector-2, had earlier confirmed to The Indian Express that only four people had been reported missing on the ground after the crash. The bodies of all four had been identified through DNA profiling and handed over to the families, thus leaving no person in the ground unaccounted for, he said.
This took the total death toll on the ground to 19 persons, a fact further corroborated by Dr Joshi who said that no new bodies had been recovered from the crash site over the last several days.
Given that most of the aircraft debris has been moved out of the crash site, and there is little chance of discovery of any new body now, the final death toll of the crash of AI 171 would be restricted to 260 people, the sources said.
Sources also told The Indian Express that there had been certain problems in matching the DNA of the remaining deceased passenger to the relatives, who had submitted their blood samples. This could be due to extensive damage to the body of this victim, who has been identified by the flight manifest but not yet confirmed by DNA, they added. The name of this victim has been kept under wraps for now.
Meanwhile, Dr Joshi said that of the 259 identified bodies, 256 had been handed over to families. These include 180 Indians, seven Portuguese, one Canadian and 49 British passengers, besides 19 non-passengers. The three remaining bodies were also of British nationals, two of which are likely to be collected on the intervening night of June 23-24. The third will be received by the kin on June 25.
Of the 256 bodies handed over to kin, 28 have been flown over by air while 228 have been transported by road.
