A UK inquest has opened into the death of the unidentified man whose remains were found in Shobhana Patel’s casket after the Air India Flight 171 crash, nearly a year after the disaster that killed 260 people. The case has left one London family waiting for a name that still has not been confirmed.
Miten Patel said hospital staff in Ahmedabad drew two vials of his blood to help identify his parents after Ashok and Shobhana Patel were flying home to London on 12 June when the plane crashed 32 seconds after take-off. The crash killed 241 people on board and 19 on the ground, and only one passenger survived. The wreckage was scattered across 37,000 sq m, or about five football pitches, and emergency workers were faced with hundreds of casualties, many of them burned and torn apart.
Patel and his brother carried dental records for both parents to Ahmedabad, where it took more than a week for their remains to be returned to the UK. Four days later, police in London told Patel that a CT scan showed his mother’s casket contained the remains of someone else, and that there were additional skeletal parts inside it. Further testing confirmed that Shobhana Patel’s remains had been mixed with those of an unidentified man.
The family then waited another month before they could cremate her remains, and Ashok Patel’s last rites were postponed so the ceremonies could be done together. Patel said he told officials he wanted his mother separated from anyone else, a request that underscored how badly the identification process had gone wrong for at least one family caught up in one of the worst aviation accidents in India’s history.
Coroner Fiona Wilcox said palm prints and DNA had been sent to India in an attempt to identify the man, but there had been no confirmation of his name to date. She called it “obviously very unusual” to open inquests nearly a year after a death and said the identity of the unidentified male remains outstanding. The next step is more identification work, but for now the question at the center of the inquest is the same one that has hung over the Patel family since the crash: who was placed in Shobhana Patel’s casket, and why has no official answer come back nearly a year later?
