Fiongal and Jamie Greenlaw-Meek were on board the Air India flight bound for London that crashed shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad, killing 242 of the 243 people on board
A woman who lost her brother in the Air India crash says being given the wrong remains has heaped further trauma on her grieving family.
Husbands Fiongal and Jamie Greenlaw-Meek, 39 and 45 respectively, were among the 242 people killed in the crash on June 12 just outside Ahmedabad airport in India’s Ahmedabad state.
Fiongal’s sister Arwen says the heartbroken family is now seeking accountability from the officials who mislabelled her beloved brother’s remains. It comes after reports of a dad’s desperate phone call moments before explosion kills him and his daughters.
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Fiongal had been a guest on This Morning earlier this year to promote the wellness brand he’d co-founded with his husband.
Speaking to the BBC, Arwen said she was also looking for “closure for the family” and “dignity” for her brother. She fears the authorities could have even cremated his body as someone else.
“If that is not possible – because the worst case scenario is that he has been cremated as somebody else – then we need to know that in order to move on,” she said.
“Somebody mislabelled remains – that has added trauma.”
She accused Indian authorities of failing to set up proper “forensic protocols” at the crash site, saying that the site remained open for two days after the plane came down.
“It just can’t happen again,” she said. “I think the whole family were and still are in complete disbelief because it is things that happen on the news and to other people. It was shocking and is confusing.”
According to the Foreign Office, it is supporting the families of Brits involved in the crash – giving them “dedicated caseworkers”. However, on the topic of the “formal identification of bodies”, it said it’s out of their hands and a “matter for the Indian authorities”.
Last month, it emerged that some of the deceased were wrongly identified before being flown home to the UK. Relatives of one victim had to abandon funeral plans after being informed that their coffin contained the body of an unknown passenger rather than their family member, it is reported.
And the “co-mingled” remnants of more than one person killed in the crash were mistakenly placed in the same casket in another shocking blunder. They had to be separated before the internment could go ahead.
Of the people who died when Air India flight 171 lost power and crashed, seconds after leaving Ahmedabad for London Gatwick, 52 were returning Britons. Two instances of mistaken identity have so far come to light, but there are fears that more such errors could have been made, leaving families under a shadow of uncertainty.