Mother of gay Air India crash victim left heartbroken after being given the wrong body
Fiongal (L) and Jamie Greenlaw-Meek were killed in the Air India flight 171 crash. (The Wellness Foundry)
Fiongal (L) and Jamie Greenlaw-Meek were killed in the Air India flight 171 crash. (The Wellness Foundry)
Amanda Donaghey, the mother of Air India crash victim Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek, has said she was “heartbroken” after she received the wrong body for burial.
Greenlaw-Meek, 39, and his 45-year-old husband Jamie were among the 260 people killed when Flight 171 crashed just seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad on 12 June. They were returning to Britain after celebrating their wedding anniversary in India.
The couple, who ran The Wellness Foundry, filmed themselves laughing in a post shared on their company’s Instagram account just hours before the fatal flight. Fifty-two British nationals were killed in the accident.
Donaghey travelled to India after the crash and gave blood to find a DNA match and help the identification process.
Eight days after the crash, a match was made and Donaghey returned to the UK with her son’s coffin. But on 5 July, police told her that further tests carried out in the UK determined the remains she brought home were not those of her son.
‘This is an appalling thing to have happened’
“We don’t know what poor person is in that casket,” she told The Sunday Times. “I had my doubts but to be told that was heart-breaking. This is an appalling thing to have happened.
“We would now like the British government to do everything in its power to… bring Fiongal home.”
Last week, the Daily Mail reported that a lawyer for several of the British victims has said that Donaghey is not the only one left searching for answers.
James Healy-Pratt, an aviation expert at Keystone Law, said: “We know that 12 caskets were repatriated from India to the UK. Of those 12, two had been mishandled, misidentified. If you extrapolate that sample, you’re looking at 40 mishandled remains.”
Another grieving relative has said the coffin he believed to contain his mother’s body was found to have “other remains”, Metro reported.
The victims’ families are calling on prime minister Keir Starmer and the Foreign Office to intervene, claiming that the Indian authorities had “not been transparent or helpful”.
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