More than 200 bodies recovered from Air India crash site

More than 200 bodies have been recovered from the site where an Air India plane bound for London crashed on Thursday afternoon.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was carrying 169 Indian nationals, 53 British, seven Portuguese and one Canadian when it went down in a residential area near Ahmedabad airport in Gujarat state.

Flight AI171 departed Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport for London Gatwick at 1.38pm local time, Air India said.

Besides the 230 passengers, it had a crew of 12.

The plane hit a doctors’ hostel as it came down.

At least 204 bodies were recovered from the crash site, local media reported, citing Ahmedabad city police chief GS Malik.

‘Bodies all around me’

One survivor, identified as 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, described the horror from his hospital bed.

“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed,” Vishwash was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times newspaper.

“When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital,” he said.

Air India chief executive officer Campbell Wilson, in a video statement in the evening, did not mention the death toll or the number of people injured.

Many world leaders and the planemaker Boeing have offered condolences over the disaster.

The 787-8 is one of the top-selling widebody aircraft.

The crashed plane was delivered to Air India in January 2014, according to the tracking website Flightradar24.

Compensation

The Tata Group, which owns Air India, said it will provide 10 million rupees (RM492,188.30) to the families of each deceased and cover the medical expenses of those injured.

“Additionally, we will provide support in building up the B J Medical’s hostel,” its chairperson N Chandrasekaran said.

Ahmedabad airport, which had suspended flights after the crash, later resumed all flight operations.

India’s Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu visited the crash site.

“We are going to do a fair and thorough investigation. We are going to go deeply into why this incident has happened,” he told reporters.

- Bernama

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