Skip to main content

Foreign team completes its task in air crash probe

KARACHI / RAWALPINDI: The visiting team of French experts sent here a week ago by Airbus to assist in the PK-8303 crash probe will be returning to France on Monday (today) after completing their assignment.

Ninety-seven passengers and crewmembers were killed and two miraculously survived when a Pakistan International Airlines’ (PIA) A320 aircraft crashed in the densely populated Model Colony area near Karachi airport on May 22.

The Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), France, had announced on Saturday the French team along with a member of the Pakistani Aircraft Accident and Investigation Board (AAIB) would go to France and the work to decode the ill-fated plane’s ‘black box’ would begin on Tuesday.

The French team comprises experts belonging to Airbus, BEA and engine manufacturing companies Safran Aircraft Engines and CFM International.

Police register a report about the incident

A Civil Aviation Authority official told Dawn on Sunday the visiting team had completed its task that included a detailed survey and examination of the crash site, runway, air-traffic control operations, engine parts and other equipment, locating of cockpit voice recorder (CVR) as well as digitally documenting all available evidence.

He said that the remaining wreckage of the aircraft and debris were being removed from the crash site and work to repair/construct the damaged houses in Jinnah Garden’s street would begin shortly.

Bodies identified

A PIA spokesperson said that by Sunday evening a total of 79 bodies of the plane crash victims had been identified and 78 of them handed over to their relatives for burial.

A Karachi University laboratory conducting DNA testing announced that the process to identify bodies would be completed in the next 24 hours.

The Sindh Forensic DNA and Serology Laboratory (SFDL) at the University of Karachi had completed a total of 37 DNA cross-matches so far, and their reports had also been dispatched to the Sindh Police.

A spokesman for the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS) said: “SFDL with the help of 20 scientists and volunteers is currently engage in massive undertaking of identifying bodies of unfortunate victims of the air crash.”

Police lodge report

The Model Colony police station has registered a report and started collecting relevant evidence for completing legal formalities in the case.

According to a senior official of the Sindh Police, an incident report (670) has been registered with the Model Colony police, but no formal FIR has been lodged.

The report said that “on May 22, 2020, at about 1437 hours an incident of plane crash” took place in the Model Colony area. “The plane probably due to some technical fault crashed over residential area namely Jinnah Garden Kazimabad, Model Colony, Karachi; resultantly about 12 houses (and) some cars were damaged and heavy human casualties reported,” the report said.

The report, signed by SSP Korangi, was sent to senior police officials, including Inspector General of Police Mushtaq Mahar. Police said an FIR is lodged only when a criminal act is involved in an incident. “If there will be any criminal aspect in the inquiry, then it would be converted into a formal FIR,” said a senior police official.

On May 29, a district court had directed the Model Colony SHO to conduct an inquiry on an application seeking registration of a case against Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan, PIA chief Arshad Malik and key officers over the PK-8303 crash. The SHO was told to file a detailed report in this regard on June 2.

Advocate Qadir Khan Mandokhel had filed a petition seeking a directive for the SSP East and the SHO to book the aviation minister, the PIA chief and others for their alleged negligence in checking the ill-fated plane before allowing it to fly.

In the plea, the applicant stated that it was the responsibility of the ground engineer and other team members at the Allama Iqbal airport, Lahore, to inspect the plane and stop it from flying if it had any technical fault, “but they failed to complete such formalities and take necessary steps”.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2020



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2Xp4V2F
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...