Air India Crash Families Battle to Identify Remains a Year After Tragedy

Fri Jun 12 2026 10:09:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

A year after the Air India crash, families fight to identify remains, uncovering painful truths and systemic failures.

The 12 June 2025 Air India flight AI‑171 crash left 260 victims and a complex issue of body identification. Families have spent a year navigating the chaotic aftermath, revealing that some remains were mixed with those of an unidentified male. The UK coroner has opened an inquest into the unknown male and is awaiting DNA and dental matches. Indian authorities have issued new guidelines, yet critics claim responsibility was not accepted, leaving families in limbo and demanding transparency.

In June 2025, Air India flight AI‑171 crashed just 32 seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people including 19 on the ground.

One family, the Patels, flew to Ahmedabad a week after the crash to help identify their parents’ remains. Miten Patel was flown in with dental records and, shortly after, received a call from London police demanding he attend an urgent meeting despite no explanation given.

A CT scan of his mother’s casket revealed it contained the bones of another, unnamed male. Authorities asked him not to reveal this to anyone for weeks, and it took a month before the family could cremate his mother’s remains, delaying Ashok Patel’s own final rites.

The UK coroner Fiona Wilcox has opened a fresh inquest into the death of the unidentified man, stating that “sent palm prints and DNA to India in an attempt to identify this gentleman” has yet to yield a name.

An independent forensic expert, Dr Deepak Venkatesh, said the scale of the disaster, with 90% of bodies severely charred, made identification nearly impossible and that “extreme thermal damage destroyed fingerprints, facial features and other visual identifiers.”

Back at the crash site, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) divided the area into zones and numbered body parts before sending samples to a local lab in Gandhinagar, where the sudden influx of DNA samples created a bottleneck.

NDMA now recommends more regional DNA labs and greater use of dental identification, but critics like Miten Patel argue that Indian authorities have not taken responsibility for mistakes, leading to a “bottleneck” that kept families waiting for identification for months.

The families who suffered the most are those who already lost loved ones and now confront the uncertainty of whether the remains they possess truly belong to their kin. Miten Patel says his battle is a “least” he can do to honour victims and to push for change.

The incident is not isolated. Amanda Donaghey famously received the wrong remains of an 70‑year‑old Indian woman, prompting her son still to search for his private remains in a systemic failure visible in many families’ narratives.

Emergency workers at the crash site struggled to recover bodies from debris spread over 37,000 square metres, all while dealing with extreme heat, broken seatbelts, and a lack of protocols for maintaining body separation.

The NDMA’s new guidelines, drafted in January 2026, acknowledge that “Comprehensive Disaster Victim Identification and Management” demands systematic attention—but the lack of comprehensive policies prior to the crash hindered timely identification.

In the end, thousands of souls remain unidentified and families suffer under prolonged uncertainty, underscoring the urgent need for transparency, proper protocols and accountability in disaster victim identification in all jurisdictions.