Bereaved families of British victims in the Air India disaster have been sent the wrong bodies, according to reports.
Some of the remains of the 261 people killed in Ahmedabad last month have been wrongly identified before being repatriated to relatives in the UK.
In one devastating case, a funeral was abandoned after it emerged the coffin contained the wrong individual.
Another incident saw the remains of two passengers “commingled” in the same coffin, according to the Daily Mail.
The errors were reportedly identified by Dr Fiona Wilcox, the Inner West London coroner, who has ordered all bodies to be matched with DNA samples provided by families.
Last month, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner headed for London Gatwick Airport crashed just seconds after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport.
British-Indian man Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, was the only person to walk away alive from the plane after it slammed into a residential building, killing 241 people on board and 19 on the ground — including his brother Ajay and 51 other UK citizens.
James Healy-Pratt, an aviation lawyer at Keystone Law, said the mistakes had left his British clients “distraught”.
“I’ve been sitting down in the homes of these lovely British families over the last month, and the first thing they want is their loved ones back,” Mr Healy-Pratt said.
“But some of them have got the wrong remains and they are clearly distraught over this. It has been going on for a couple of weeks (and) I think these families deserve an explanation.”
Many remains found by search and rescue teams at the crash site were burnt, mutilated or fragmented, with some having to be identified by DNA and dental records.
Families could not verify the Indian authorities’ identifications themselves, with some allegedly receiving remains from Ahmedabad’s Civil Hospital in a plastic container.
Altaf Taju, from Blackburn in Lancashire, lost his parents Adam, 72 and Hasina, 70, and his brother-in-law Altafhusen Patel, 51, in the crash.
“Nobody looked at the remains,” he said. “We weren’t allowed to. They just said, ‘This is your mother or father,’ and gave us a paper label with an ID number on it. We had to take their word for it.”
A UK Government spokesman said: “Formal identification of bodies is a matter for the Indian authorities. We understand that this is an extremely distressing time for the families, and our thoughts remain with them.”
