DNA matching completed, 260 confirmed dead in Air India crash
An Indian Airlines plane crashed on the 12th, with only one person surviving out of more than 200 people on board, and dozens of people on land were also affected. Gujarat officials confirmed that after DNA matching and facial recognition, the exact number of victims was 260.
An Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed on the 12th, and many media outlets said the death toll reached 279 based on pieced-together information.
The flight, which was originally scheduled to fly from Ahmedabad, India to London, England, exploded and caught fire after the crash. The body parts of the victims were scattered and difficult to identify due to the fire, making the identification of the bodies more difficult.
The Economic Times of India said that the authorities collected 318 body parts at the scene of the accident. After inspection, it was confirmed that 260 people died in the plane crash.
Officials in Gujarat said that 254 of the victims were identified through DNA testing and 6 through facial recognition. 241 of the victims were on board (including crew members and passengers), including 181 Indian citizens, 52 British citizens, 7 Portuguese, 1 Canadian, and 19 people who were unfortunately killed on land.
The Gujarat government’s statement mentioned that the autopsy work this time was the hope and emotion of countless families, so experts from Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot and other places rushed to the scene to support, which accelerated the speed of DNA identification so that family members could take back the bodies of their loved ones in the shortest time.
The Indian Express mentioned that in addition to many people who were obviously dead at the time of the accident, there were 5 injured people who were sent to the hospital for emergency treatment, 4 of whom died of their injuries, and the other 1 was discharged from the hospital on the 28th.
Both black boxes of the crashed Indian Airlines flight were found shortly after the crash. The data of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) have been downloaded and interpreted in India. The preliminary investigation results are expected to be announced soon.
