There is frustration and anger among family and friends of the victims of the Air India crash. And it’s growing – directed towards the administration.
The wait under a searing summer heat at the civil hospital in Ahmedabad is agonising – the trauma compounded by the lack of communication and information.
Rashid Hora has lost three family members, including his four-year-old niece, all British nationals from Gloucester.
He tells Sky News: “Victims’ families need confirmation, you’ve taken our DNA and how many have been matched, how many bodies have you identified? Tell us.
“It’s now over 48 hours and we have no information. Will they give us a body when it’s decomposed, or give us someone else’s body?
“If they cannot cope, they should get some help from somewhere else.”
Mr Hora is not alone in this pain.
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Rafiq Menon has been camping here for days to collect the bodies of four members of his family, all British, who lived in London.
Javed, 37, with his wife Mariam and their two children, five-year-old Zayn and four-year-old Amani, came to visit their grandmother for Eid.
Eyes welling up, he tells Sky News: “With folded hands I request you to ask the officials, not me. There is no information from them.
“It’s been over 72 hours now, taken another 72 hours. But tell us. We are looking for our children, where are they, we want to know if they have found my children.
“Tell us if you have them, don’t torture us. At least tell us their bodies have been found. But they don’t tell us anything.”
Mr Hora added that “the authorities have barricaded themselves inside and do not allow anyone in”.
Another member from his family says “there is no one here from the British High Commission to help us, hear us out – no one has even contacted us”.
Families have camped at the hospital for days providing DNA samples, which are being matched and it is painstakingly slow.
Due to the nature of the crash, many bodies have been disfigured beyond recognition.
Dr Rajnish Patel, a senior doctor of the B J Medical College, said: “The DNA of 11 victims of the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad has been matched with their family members so far.
“The process of matching DNA has to be done meticulously. It has legal and medical implications, so one can not rush through it.”
But families want regular communication and updates and, at this point in time, are anxious and vulnerable.
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The Air India plane failed to gain altitude after take-off and plummeted into the ground, erupting into a ball of fire.
Fully loaded with fuel, the Boeing Dreamliner bound for London’s Gatwick Airport crashed into a residential area, incinerating everything in its path.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the crash site on Friday and took stock of the situation. His government’s civil aviation ministry is also looking to overhaul its safety policy.
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At a press conference in Delhi, civil aviation minister Kinjarapu Rammohan Naidu said: “We do have a very strict protocol, robust protocol, which we follow every time.
“But even when the incident happened, we also felt that there is a need to do an extended surveillance into the Boeing 787 series.
“So from the [directorate general of civil aviation] we have also given an order to do the extended surveillance for the 787 planes.”
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On Saturday, there was an attempt to remove the tail of the aircraft embedded into the building into which it crashed.
The cause of the crash remains unknown and investigators have begun the long and complex process of determining what went wrong.
All this may be for the future. But for the moment, the victims’ families want closure and dignity.
They want this ordeal to end soon and to say their final goodbyes to their loved ones.
