A plane making the trip from India to London crashed only moments after takeoff, killing all but one of the 242 people on board. Since the disaster, families have been sent the remains of their loved ones, but some have claimed that they have received the wrong bodies.
The plane crashed into a medical college as it careened back to earth. The resulting impact and fireball killed a further 19 people. The cleanup has been vast and apparently complex. As a result, people have been sent the wrong bodies as they are repatriated.
Grieving families have received remains that don’t belong to the family members they are labelled as. In some cases, the bodies are comingled with others from the crash. Their remains are combined with others. People have been opening cascets to find complete strangers had been shipped to them.
Corpse Confusions Cancels Funeral
The discovery was made by coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox when she looked to verify the corpse transported back to the UK. Her discovery led to the cancellation of a funeral the family had arranged. As a result, the airline disaster body had to be sent back, and an investigation into the intended victim’s location started.
The comingled body parts recovered from the plane crash had to be separated before a funeral could take place. The remains of the unknown extra corpse have been sent back to India to be properly identified.
The coroner’s discovery had led to an investigation into the other bodies recovered from the airline crash. A top-level inquiry is underway into the locations of the bodies. They will try to discover where the originals are and how someone could be sent the wrong one.
Kier Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, is working alongside Narendra Modi on his visit later this week. A total of 12 bodies were repatriated after the airline disaster. But this recent discovery has raised concerns that many people received the wrong corpse.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, a man who lost three family members recalled how the return of his loved ones went. “They just said, “This is your mother or father”, and gave us a paper label with an ID number on it. We had to take their word for it. It’s horrific that this could have happened, but what could anyone do?”