Air-crash victims’ remains wrongly identified – lawyer

THE repatriated remains of some of the British victims of the Air India crash were wrongly identified, a lawyer has said, with grieving families left struggling to say goodbye to their loved ones.

- ELLIENG

The London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a medical college shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad Airport on June 12, killing 241 people on board.

Some 169 Indian passengers and 52 British nationals were killed, making it one of the deadliest plane crashes in terms of the number of British fatalities.

Aviation lawyer James Healy-Pratt, whose firm, Keystone Law, is representing more than 20 British families who lost loved ones in the disaster, said relatives of one victim found out a casket contained “co-mingled” remains, while a different family was told a coffin contained the body of someone else entirely, not their loved one.

Mr Healy-Pratt, who is a partner at the firm, said the mistakes emerged after the “sterling efforts” of senior coroner for Inner West London Dr Fiona Wilcox, who “picked up DNA anomalies” at the beginning of the repatriations.

“In the first two caskets that were repatriated, in one of the caskets, there was co-mingling of DNA which did not relate to the deceased in that casket or the casket that accompanied it and so that’s what alerted her and her team to the fact there was a serious problem,” he told the PA news agency.

“My understanding was that the co-mingling was at the very beginning, which alerted Dr Wilcox to the fact that she had to be 100% assiduous about checking the identification of the incoming remains.

“She was then able to determine that one particular loved one was not at all who the family thought they were.”