Plane crash: 19 bodies of Pakistan International Airlines plane crash victims forcibly taken

Relatives did not even let the authorities conduct DNA tests to identify charred bodies

Dubai: At least 19 bodies of the 97 PIA plane crash victims have been forcibly taken by their relatives from a hospital mortuary in Karachi.

Faisal Edhi, head of the Edhi Foundation, revealed that relatives of passengers who lost their lives in the PIA plane crash in Karachi on May 22, have forcibly taken at least 19 bodies, most of them were charred, from the morgue.

This means that the process of DNA testing to identify bodies of passengers killed in the plane crash has been jeopardised.

The Edhi Foundation is a non-profit volunteer organisation, which runs free ambulance service in Karachi and across Pakistan. Their ambulances transported most of the bodies and injured from the plane crash site to hospitals.

No proof of identification

Faisal Edhi said that it was unfortunate that the relatives did not even provide any proof or identification before taking away the bodies. Edhi also appealed to the relatives of the victims to not argue and fight with the morgue staff.

Edhi said that because of the aggression of the victims’ relatives and pressure from political figures, the morgue administration was forced to hand over the bodies to them. “The government should provide security to the morgue’s management,” he told reporters in Karachi.

41 bodies identified

So far, the authorities have handed over 41 bodies to their families after identifying them, according to the health ministry.

The Punjab Forensic Science Agency (PFSA) has collected DNA samples of 52 victims of the ill-fated PK-8303 flight that crashed on a residential area of Model Colony just before landing on May 22.

Edhi expressed concern that the bodies forcibly taken by their relatives might not have been correctly identified and later, the need might arise to exhume them for the purpose of identification.

Safety fears

He said that the families that had taken the bodies with them claimed to have recognised the deceased through personal belongings such as watches, identity cards and clothes, according to reports in Pakistani media.

“But since the bodies were badly burnt, there are high chances that they were wrongly identified, considering that there are possibilities of deceased belongings getting exchanged,” he said.

He also claimed that while the families took the bodies, police did not help Edhi workers to stop them. “We handed over the bodies to the families out of the fear of vandalism,” he said.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson of the Sindh government has said that the DNA tests of victims’ bodies in the PIA plane crash incident, who were not identified so far, had been completed. He said that all the bodies would be handed over to their heirs within 10 days.