At noon on Friday, Manish Namdar entered the examination hall of Ahmedabad’s BJ Medical College, now converted to a DNA collection room for the next of kin of the more than 250 people who died in the Air India crash a day earlier.
Namdar and his family had driven 800km overnight, desperate to see the faces of his 32-year-old daughter Raxa Modha and one-and-a-half-year-old grandson Rudhra, who were on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that fell on a nearby college student hostel on Thursday.
But officials told Namdar the bodies were charred beyond recognition and DNA matches would be needed before they could be released.
“I want to see my kids,” he yelled at a state government official who tried to console him at the hall, part of a sprawling campus that includes training and residential facilities and the main state hospital for Ahmedabad, the largest city in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
Authorities have yet to release an official death toll, but they say more than 250 bodies had been brought the previous day to the medical college morgue adjoining the examination hall. The smell from the morgue filled the hot summer air outside the building.
As well as the 241 passengers and crew who died on the flight, the college said at least four students and four members of doctors’ families were killed when the airliner crashed into the hostel just minutes after it took off from the city airport about a mile away. At least one person was also killed on the ground outside the hostel.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the site of the disaster on Friday, viewing the wreckage of the airliner scattered in and around the hostel buildings. “The scene of devastation is saddening,” Modi wrote in a social media post. “Our thoughts remain with those who lost their loved ones in this unimaginable tragedy.”
But for some relatives of the dead, grief was already turning to anger.
Sagar, a 29-year-old tech employee from Mumbai who declined to give his family name, came to the examination hall with the parents of his girlfriend, Manisha Thapa, a member of the crew of the Air India flight.
Holding back tears, Sagar said the disaster was not an “aircraft failure”, but a “management failure” by Air India, a view that reflected growing anger at the airline among crash members’ families.
The cause of the crash is still unclear. Investigators on Friday found a “black box” flight recorder from the crashed aircraft, which civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said would “significantly aid the enquiry”. Air India said on Friday it was “giving its full co-operation to the authorities”.
Rafique, 52, travelled to Ahmedabad from Mumbai to collect the remains of his nephew, Javed Ali, 37, and Ali’s wife and two children aged four and two, all of whom were on the flight.
Ali, he said, was the only working member of a family that included his mother and an unemployed elder brother.
But Rafique said authorities had told them it would be three days before their remains could be handed over. “These are humans, not animals,” he said. “What will I answer to his mother if the condition of the bodies deteriorates in three days?”
Minakshi Parikh, the college’s dean, said her over-150-year-old institution was facing a challenging situation. “The bodies from the plane crash that have come here were in severely burnt conditions . . . we can only hand over the bodies to their kin only after DNA testing confirmation.”
Parikh said the known college fatalities had “probably died of suffocation” as black plumes of dense smoke filled a large area after the crash.
She said there could be others still unaccounted for in the hostel compound. “We are very sorry for your loss,” Parikh told the families of the dead. “Please bear with us”.
Prathima, a resident doctor at the medical college, said that “nobody in the college is untouched” by the disaster. The hostel canteen, which bore much of the brunt of the crash, was a popular place for resident doctors and students to eat and everyone knew somebody who had died or been affected, she said.
“When the plane entered the building, those eating near the wall, they died on the spot,” said Ram, a first-year student at the college, as he waited to collect the remains of a friend.
Not far from the morgue, autorickshaw driver Sureshbhai Babubhai, 46, sat on a kerb, holding his head in his hands.
The younger of his two sons, Akash, a 15-year-old eighth grade student, was killed at the family’s tea stall near the hostel gate when the plane came down.
“My nephew, who was also there, told me that as the plane crashed it directly hit him . . . my wife tried to save him from the fire, but she also got burnt.” His wife, he said, was alive and being treated in hospital.
