Bodies of stampede victims airlifted

Agencies

Nedumbassery, 16 January 2011: The mortal remains of fifteen persons, who were killed in a stampede at Pulmedu near Sabarimala, were dispatched to their home state from the airport here on Sunday.

 

According to airport officials, about 22 coffins carrying the victims have been brought to the airport from Kochi as early as by 5 a.m. in the morning and the remaining seven are scheduled to be airlifted in subsequent flights to different destinations from here later in the day.

 

District Collector M. Beena along with the ADM K.N Raji and the Aluva Tahasildar M.A.Joseph were present at the airport to oversee the airlifting of the deceased persons.

 

The Jet Airways flight 9w 406 which carried the corpses of Venkiteswara Rao, Rajkumar Appa and Uppala Prasad took off to Mumbai by 8.15 a.m. while the next flight to Mumbai, Air India IC 182 lifted the bodies of Prasad, Ramu, Ganesh and Shinu. On reaching Mumbai, the bodies will be ferried to Hyderabad.

 

 

 

About an hour later, the bodies of Ramachandran, Arun Kumar, G.Raj and Gangadhara Rao were sent to Chennai by an Air India flight IC 509 at 9.50 a.m. An Indigo flight (6E 315) that left to Chennai by 10.10 a.m. lifted the bodies of Sarveshan, Sreenivas, Achut and Rambabu Reddy.

 

While the cadavers of Govindu, Hari Prasad Gujale Venkiteswara and Aravind, will be sent directly to Hyderabad by a Spice jet flight SG 108, the remaining bodies, identified as Ramachandra Murthy, P.Surly and Govinda Rao will be transported by a Jet lite flight to Hyderabad at 2.10 in the after noon.

 

CIAL has already made elaborate arrangements to ferry the victims’ bodies following information that the Governments of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka States are likely to send chartered flights to ferry the bodies to their respective homes States.

 

Twenty dead bodies of pilgrims who died in the Sabarimala tragedy were brought to General Hospital late on Saturday night and were embalmed here and sent to Hyderabad on various flights by Sunday morning. Relatives of the dead accompanied the bodies. There are nine more dead bodies lying in the General Hospital mortuary that need to be identified. As soon as they are identified, the bodies would be embalmed, the hospital superintendent Junaid Rehman said.