India sends 'wrong bodies' of Air India crash victims to UK families

Several British families who lost their loved ones in the recent Air India crash are facing fresh grief after they learned that the remains of their loved ones have been wrongly identified before repatriation to the UK.

James Healy-Pratt, a lawyer supporting the families of many of the 52 British nationals killed in the crash, said that the identification errors came to light when a West London coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, tried to confirm the identities of the repatriated bodies through DNA matching.

The remains of at least 12 victims had been returned to the UK.

In one case, a family was forced to cancel funeral plans after discovering that the coffin they received contained the body of an unidentified passenger.

In another case, the remains of more than one person had been mistakenly placed in the same casket and had to be separated before a burial could take place.

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“These families are heartbroken,” Daily Mail reported, quoting Healy-Pratt. “Some have received the wrong remains. Others have had to deal with the trauma of having ‘commingled’ remains that needed to be identified and separated. They deserve answers.”

On June 12, a London-bound Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a medical college shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad airport.

The crash killed all 241 people onboard, including the 52 British nationals, and an additional 19 people on the ground. Another 67 were injured.