British families grieving after the Air India disaster have discovered that the remains of their loved ones were wrongly identified before repatriation, according to an aviation lawyer representing them. Relatives of one victim had to abandon funeral plans after being informed that their coffin contained the body of an unknown passenger. In another case, the 'commingled' remains of more than one person killed in the crash were mistakenly placed in the same casket and had to be separated before the interment could go ahead, the Daily Mail reported.
The mistakes emerged when the senior coroner for London Inner West, Dr Fiona Wilcox, sought to verify the repatriated Britons' identities by matching their DNA with samples provided by the families. The news came before the start of a two-day state visit to London by India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, who will meet his British counterpart, Keir Starmer, to sign a landmark free trade agreement.
A London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a medical college shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad airport on 12 June, killing 241 people onboard, of whom 52 were returning Britons. Another 19 people died on the ground. A preliminary report found the plane's fuel switches had been moved to cut-off, deepening the mystery of what happened.
James Healy-Pratt, an aviation lawyer representing many of the British families, said he expected Starmer to raise these issues with Modi. 'The families deserve urgent answers and assurances about the whereabouts of their loved ones,' he said. He added that while one family had been able to have the remains separated for a funeral, another was 'in limbo' with no one to bury.
Healy-Pratt said the families were in contact with their MPs, the Foreign Office and the offices of the prime minister and the foreign secretary. 'On the known evidence, the chain of custody of these lost loved ones was unacceptably poor,' he said. 'We are investigating the causes of those failures and demanding answers on behalf of these deserving British families.'
