A year after the Air India crash killed 260 people in Ahmedabad, a CT scan in the UK revealed that one returned casket held two sets of remains, and the second set has still not been identified.
A year after an Air India flight went down in Ahmedabad, the systems built to identify the 260 people killed have not finished their work. Some of the failures are visible in court filings; others are visible only when a coffin is opened in a country the victims never lived in.
On 12 June 2025, an Air India plane bound for London crashed 32 seconds after take-off in Ahmedabad, killing 241 people on board and 19 on the ground, in one of the worst aviation accidents in India's recent history. The dead included Ashok and Shobhana Patel, who were on their way to visit their son Miten in the United Kingdom. Within days, Miten Patel was on a plane back, and not just any plane: he and his brother had to fly Air India itself to Ahmedabad, he told the BBC, because no other carrier was serving the route. He spoke Gujarati, the local language, but knew no one in the city. He did not initially know what "repatriation" meant.
At the Ahmedabad hospital, staff drew two vials of Miten Patel's blood for DNA matching and the brothers carried dental records they had gathered overseas. The work that followed, over months, across two legal systems, and through a chain of foreign morgues, consulates, and airlines, was supposed to end with a named set of remains, returned to a named family, in a sealed coffin. In the Patels' case, it did not.
When Shobhana Patel's remains eventually reached the UK, a CT scan revealed that her casket also contained the remains of an unidentified man, according to the BBC's reporting. Her cremation was delayed by a month while her son fought for a second identification. No family should have to wage that fight. The man in the casket, a year on, still has not been named.
That single fact, one coffin, two families, only one answer, is the closest thing to a public autopsy the identification process has produced. A hearing in the UK this week, before Coroner Fiona Wilcox, is now the venue where the chain is being laid out. Palm prints and DNA samples have been sent back to India. The questions under examination are not about what caused the crash; they are about what happened after.
They include why cross-border DNA and palm-print matching took as long as it did, who is responsible when a coffin is mislabeled or co-mingled, and what Air India's repatriation protocol actually required of the carrier on the day the dead were flown home. The BBC's South Asia correspondent Azadeh Moshiri and reporter Charlotte Scarr, who is in Ahmedabad, framed the anniversary not as a memorial story but as a working one: families are still waiting, and a man in a UK morgue is still waiting with them.
A year is long enough for grief to settle into procedure. It is not long enough, in this case, for procedure to have settled into a name.