Funerals begin for 279 killed in Air India crash

Health officials begin handing over bodies of passengers identified by DNA testing

Mourners remember teenage Air India crash victim Akash Patni at his home in Ahmedabad on Sunday. Getty Images

Mourners began holding funerals on Sunday for the 279 people killed in an Air India crash, in one of the world's worst plane disasters in years.

Health officials began releasing bodies of passengers after identifying them with DNA testing. They were handed over in white coffins in the city of Ahmedabad.

Air India's Flight 171 to London crashed into a residential area of Ahmedabad on Thursday, leaving just one survivor out of 242 passengers and crew. At least 38 more people were killed on the ground.

Witnesses reported seeing badly burnt bodies and scattered remains. Mourning relatives have been providing DNA samples to be matched with passengers, with 32 identified as of Sunday.

"This is a meticulous and slow process, so it has to be done meticulously only," Rajnish Patel, a doctor at Ahmedabad's civil hospital, said late Saturday.

The majority of those injured on the ground have been discharged, he added, with one or two remaining in critical care.

Workers were clearing debris on Sunday from the residential area where the Air India plane came down. AFP

Around 20 to 30 mourners gathered at one crematorium in Ahmedabad on Sunday, chanting prayers in a funeral ceremony for Megha Mehta, a passenger who had been working in London.

Indian authorities are yet to reveal the cause of the disaster and have ordered inspections of Air India's Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners. The Flight 171 jet erupted into a fireball when it went down moments after takeoff, smashing into buildings used by medical staff.

Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said Saturday he hoped decoding the recovered black box, or flight data recorder, would "give an in-depth insight" into what went wrong.

The sole survivor was British citizen Vishwashkumar Ramesh whose brother was also on the flight. Air India said there were 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese and a Canadian on board the flight, as well as 12 crew members.

Also among the passengers was a father of two young girls, Arjun Patoliya, who had travelled to India to scatter his wife's ashes following her death weeks earlier.

"I really hope that those girls will be looked after by all of us," said Anjana Patel, the mayor of London's Harrow borough where some of the victims lived. "We don't have any words to describe how the families and friends must be feeling," she added.

While communities were in mourning, one woman recounted how she survived only by arriving late at the airport. "The airline staff had already closed the check-in," said 28-year-old Bhoomi Chauhan.

"At that moment, I kept thinking that if only we had left a little earlier, we wouldn't have missed our flight," she told the Press Trust of India news agency.