A 36-year-old UK-based Indian man, Arjun Manubhai Patolia, was among the 265 people killed in the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad on Thursday, which is one of the deadliest aviation disasters in recent history. Patolia had travelled from the UK to Gujarat to fulfil his late wife Bharatiben’s final wish to immerse her ashes in the Narmada River. His wife had passed away a week earlier in London.
Patolia had completed the funeral rites in his ancestral village, Vadiya, and was returning to the UK to his two daughters, aged 4 and 8, when tragedy struck on the Air India flight to London’s Gatwick Airport.
“He had a ticket on Air India flight AI171. He was supposed to go to London, but the accident happened,” Krish Jagdish Patolia, Arjun’s nephew told India Today.
Flight AI171 crashed minutes after take-off from Ahmedabad airport which claimed the lives of 265 people. On the flight, a total of 230 passengers, including 169 Indians and 53 British nationals boarded.
In the tragic incident, only one passenger in seat 11A survived, identified as Ramesh Biswas Kumar. He was sitting close to the emergency exit, and jumped from the aircraft before it went down.
“It happened in front of my eyes. Even I couldn’t believe how I survived. For a moment, I was confident that I was going to die. But when I opened my eyes, I realised that I was alive, then I tried to unplug my seat belt and exit from the broken emergency door. While I managed to exit, uncle-aunty sitting near me and an air hostess lost their lives in front of my eyes,” said Ramesh.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday also visited the crash site and met injured survivors at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital.
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