All the remains found from the Air India flight 171 crash site in Ahmedabad have been identified using DNA matching or facial recognition, barring one case, Gujarat health department officials said on Tuesday, tentatively putting the death toll from India’s worst aviation disaster in decades at 260.
“So far, the death toll due to the plane crash is 260. This includes 241 people on board and 19 non-passengers. No new bodies have been recovered from the site in the last few days,” said a senior government official.
One DNA sample that probably is of a passenger is yet to be matched successfully, said Dr. Rakesh Joshi, Superintendent of Ahmedabad Civil Hospital. An official aware of the matter said the DNA sample extracted seems to be in a fragmented or degraded state, creating difficulties in matching it with samples provided by relatives. “Fresh re-sampling is required,” said the official.
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Dr. Joshi said that so far 253 victims were identified through DNA testing while six were identified through facial recognition.
{{/usCountry}}Dr. Joshi said that so far 253 victims were identified through DNA testing while six were identified through facial recognition.
{{/usCountry}}“The site of the crash is still being cleared. Unless we are certain that no additional victims are going to be found, we cannot declare the final death toll,” news agency Reuters quoted Dr Joshi as saying.
A total of 318 body parts were recovered from the crash site at Meghaninagar, said a senior police official.
The London-bound Air India Dreamliner aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff on June 12 from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, killing 241 of the 242 people onboard. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national of Indian origin, emerged as the lone survivor. The impact devastated the residential block of a nearby medical college, claiming several lives on the ground.
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Additional chief secretary of the health and family welfare department, Dhananjay Dwivedi, told HT as many as 250 relatives of the deceased, including non-passengers, gave DNA samples for identification. He said that while the DNA samples of the relatives of the victims were collected at Ahmedabad Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL), the DNA matching was conducted at FSL Gandhinagar and the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU).
“In some cases, multiple DNA samples from relatives were required, while in others, a single relative’s sample was sufficient to identify multiple family members who died in the crash,” he added.
“This was one of the biggest DNA-matching efforts that India has seen,” said Dr. Bhargav Patel, Head of the Center of Excellence in DNA Forensics at the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU).
A DNA matching exercise such as this typically takes months. But in the case of the AI 171 crash, identification of viable samples has been completed in about two weeks.
Dr. Vishal Mewada, assistant professor at NFSU, developed specialized in-house software that significantly accelerated the DNA matching process. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was that it took 5-7 minutes for a single match using the existing technology, but with the new software, we could match 500 samples in just five minutes,” he explained.