In the cozy kitchen of her Leicester terraced house, a young wife diligently prepares lunch for her visiting in-laws. With her pregnancy quite advanced, she embodies an image of serene domesticity. However, there’s a notable absence in this family gathering.
Nearly a year ago, Hiral Ramesh’s husband, Vishwash Kumar, captured international attention with his miraculous escape from an Air India jet disaster. The crash, which occurred shortly after take-off, claimed the lives of all 229 passengers, 12 crew members, and 19 individuals on the ground—except for Kumar.
Defying the odds in an extraordinary way, the 40-year-old businessman emerged from the catastrophe with only minor injuries. Amidst the chaos and tragedy surrounding him, he managed to crawl through a fuselage opening just before the aircraft was consumed by a fireball, cementing his place in the history of aviation disasters.
Now, as filmmakers compete for the rights to narrate his story, The Mail on Sunday reveals an uplifting development: Hiral is expecting a “miracle baby.” This joyful news adds a poignant layer to their story, with the baby due to arrive just weeks after the first anniversary of the harrowing crash, on June 12. Such a heartening update certainly offers a compelling twist for any potential screenplay.
Filmmakers are said to be vying for the rights to his story and The Mail on Sunday’s exclusive revelation today, that his wife is expecting a miracle baby – due to be born a few weeks after the first anniversary of the disaster, on June 12 – could lend a heartwarming twist to the script.
Inviting our reporter into her home a few days ago, a radiant Hiral told us how ‘happy’ she was at the prospect of having a second child – a brother or sister for their five-year-old son. It would be ‘a new life and a new start for the family’, she said.
Regrettably, however, her husband is struggling to share her joy. He is suffering from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, doubtless exacerbated by despondency at the loss of his much-loved older brother Ajay, 45, who was with him on the flight, and the torment of trying to understand why he, alone, was spared.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was the sole survivor of the crash. He is suffering from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
On the afternoon of our visit, his younger brother Nayan, 28, said he had shut himself in his bedroom, where he spends long hours alone, battling his demons. It seems he hasn’t moved on since last November, when his angst was laid bare in a brief, and clearly painful TV interview.
‘I’m still not good. I’m finding myself with difficulties, physically and mentally,’ Mr Ramesh said then. ‘It’s very painful to explain how [the escape] happened, still. I’m the luckiest man alive, but I lost everything. My brother was my backbone. I just sit in my room alone, not talking to my wife, my son, anyone.’
As with the families of the deceased crash victims, Air India’s shameful lack of support can hardly have helped his recovery.
With their reputation already tarnished, and threatening to hit rock-bottom next month – when India’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau should reveal the tragedy’s causes in its final report – the airline might have been expected to manage the aftermath with efficiency, generosity and compassion.
Certainly, that was the hope of Radd Seiger, a retired lawyer advising Mr Ramesh pro bono (a role he fulfilled successfully for the family of Harry Dunn, the teenager killed by a US diplomat driving on the wrong side of the road in Northamptonshire in 2019, and which he is also undertaking for relatives of the 2023 Nottingham stabbing victims).
When Mr Seiger began negotiating with Air India, Mr Ramesh was still recovering with relatives in the small Gujarat fishing town of Diu, from which many people have migrated to Britain and where 14 of the jet’s passengers lived.
He was terrified at the prospect of flying home – on the same type of plane as he boarded on June 12, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, and following the same route, from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick. However, if the American lawyer thought company reps would ‘love-bomb’ the sole survivor – whose seat number, 11A, has come to symbolise good luck for air travellers the world over – he was mistaken.
It was all he could do to persuade them to give Mr Ramesh a business class seat for his white-knuckle flight home. They only relented after Emirates offered to step in.
Though Air India claim to be ‘deeply conscious’ of their responsibility towards Mr Ramesh, Mr Seiger also says they repeatedly rebuffed his entreaties to work with him ‘collaboratively’. Their reported interim compensation offer was just £21,500.
Since the fishing business he and Ajay operated in Diu is said to be struggling, because he is unable to work, and the Covid pandemic badly hit their Leicester garment firm, this derisory sum won’t go very far.
But at least it is negotiable. Many poor Indian victims claim they were pressurised into signing contracts in acceptance of similar payments – with the proviso that they waive the right to make any further claim.
The Mail on Sunday has seen one such document signed by Ajay Palmar, a gardener at the medical hostel struck by the plane who suffered 23 per cent burns and permanent deafness.
He accepted a £4,600 top-up to his £23,000 payment ‘in full and final satisfaction’ of all future claims – not only against Air India but also the aviation authorities, the aircraft’s manufacturer Boeing and a raft of companies who made parts.
Mr Palmar, who is in his 20s, has since been deserted by his young wife and fears he may never be able to work again. He says he had no idea of the contract’s implications and was pressed to sign it in haste.
Among British families, there is also widespread anger over the intrusive questionnaires bereaved family members were required to complete so that Air India could assess the financial ‘value’ of their loved ones.
Arwen Greenlaw-Meek, whose brother Fiongal, 39, died with his husband Jamie, likens the impersonal emailed forms – the only communication she has received from Air India – to those required when applying for a bank loan. Their mother, Amanda Donaghey, describes them as ‘inhumane’.
Miten Patel, from Orpington, south-east London, lost his mother Shobhana and father Ashok in the crash
In assessing her son’s compensatory worth, Ms Donaghey told me the airline asked every imaginable question about his income and outgoings, right down to whether he had bought her birthday and Christmas presents.
From her answers they deemed the life of this charismatic spiritual adviser, who was about to embark on a TV career, to be worth ‘something like £50,000’.
The process was ‘eviscerating’, says Ms Donaghey – whose grief was exacerbated when she received the wrong remains from the Indian authorities: a scandal I first revealed in the Daily Mail last July. Appallingly, Fiongal’s family still don’t know what became of his ‘lost’ body and could only bury a tiny sliver of his skin obtained for DNA testing when they held his woodland funeral in Cambridgeshire.
When his mother returns to India to mark the anniversary, she will endeavour to find the place where he rests.
The Indian authorities, meanwhile, continue to deny responsibility for ghastly mix-ups such as this, ludicrously claiming they happened in London after the remains were repatriated. This is implausible.
For as I was told by Miten Patel, from Orpington, south-east London, whose mother Shobhana’s remains were commingled with those of another, still unknown victim, the identification checks, at St George’s hospital, in Tooting, south London, were carried out by CT scan – without the casketsmeven being opened.
There is disgust, too, over Air India’s shoddy handling of 23,000 personal effects recovered from the wreckage. To claim them back, families were obliged to search through hundreds of pages on a password-protected portal, likened by Fiongal’s sister to an ‘eBay site without the price tags’.
Captain Sumeet Sabharwal. Investigators were quick to assume the pilot was suffering from depression
Browsing through the displayed items, another thing struck Ms Greenlaw-Meek as very odd: nothing of any great value was on display.
Did she suspect that the passengers’ possessions were looted? ‘Oh, absolutely,’ she says. ‘On a plane full of more than 200
passengers, I don’t believe they didn’t find more than one or two watches. I know that’s unkind of me – you should assume good intent. But the whole thing leaves a really bad taste.’
The victims died in different ways. Some were almost completely incinerated, others were suffocated by the fumes or killed by impact injuries, so their bodies and even their clothes stayed remarkably intact.
As their remains were recovered – by an army of volunteers who wore no protection and sifted through the toxic smouldering wreckage with their hands – they were removed to a makeshift mortuary at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad.
Entry to this room of horrors was understandably barred to family members, but last week I spoke exclusively to a man who claims to have gained access to it.
And the astonishing scene he purports to have witnessed could help to disprove the highly contested theory that the plane was crashed deliberately by the suicidal captain, Sumeet Sabharwal. The scenario suggested by India’s state-run air accident investigation bureau, in a preliminary report published a month after the disaster, would make Sabharwal a mass murderer – and conveniently absolve Air India and Boeing of blame.
While it left many questions unanswered, not least concerning the Dreamliner 787-8’s history of electrical and mechanical faults, it included a seemingly damning cockpit exchange between the captain and his 32-year-old first officer, Clive Kunder.
As the engines lost power, at an altitude of about 600 feet, one of the pair – who was not identified in the report but is widely believed to be Kunder – asked the other why he had switched off the fuel supply. ‘I did not do so,’ came the reply. Since the unmarried captain had been divorced some years ago and juggled his career with caring for his widowed 91-year-old father, investigators were quick to assume he must have been secretly suffering from depression.
Investigators callously strove to prove this theory, calling at the elderly man’s Mumbai home on the pretext of offering condolences – then bombarding him with questions about his son’s mental health. Insisting his ‘dedicated, popular’ son was perfectly well, and in good spirits when they spoke by phone shortly before the plane departed, Captain Sabharwal’s father has appealed for an independent judicial inquiry.
His insistence that Sabharwal was actually a hero is supported by the testimony of Romin Vohra, 32, who lost his aunt, Yashmin, brother Parvez, 33 (who worked in London for Amazon) and his three-year-old niece, Zuveria.
During the Covid pandemic, Romin told me, he was a pathology lab assistant at the Civil Hospital, so, seeking to identify his three family members, he persuaded contacts to allow him into the mortuary. There he ‘saw things I can never unsee’.
Most of the victims’ remains were laid side by side on the floor: severed heads and limbs; a charred mother with her child still in her arms; the skull of a little girl, which he vainly tried to match with his niece’s photo.
Amid this Daliesque vision of hell, Romin claims to have seen the body of Captain Sabharwal.
He had been set down in a corner of the room, away from the other victims, and his back was burnt. But the front of his body was ‘absolutely perfect’, he says. His uniform – a white shirt with four gold stripes on the shoulders, a dark tie and trousers – was also intact, and he was still wearing his shoes.
But the most extraordinary thing, Romin told me, was that the captain, who remained in the sitting position, was still clutching the plane’s double-handled yoke, or steering column, which appeared to have been sheered-off on impact, or cut off when he was removed from the cockpit.
This account is supported by that of a hospital doctor who was also in the mortuary at the time. Assuming their recall is accurate (and Romin says he is ‘1,000 per cent’ sure of what he saw) India’s air pilot federation president Captain CS Randhawa says this would prove Sabharwal was ‘doing exactly what a captain is trained to do in an emergency’.
Any responsible captain would take over the aircraft (from the first officer, who was at the controls on take-off) and try until the very last second to get the nose up. When the final report is released next month we may learn the truth. However, Sabharwal’s family have little faith in the investigation process.
They ask why his body was returned in a coffin that seemed too small to contain his 6ft 2ins frame; and why they were never allowed to see him in the casket. Their suspicions are shared by the victims’ family members. They are convinced the captain has been cynically scapegoated by the Indian authorities.
The plane, a Boeing 787-8 jet, embedded into the BJ Medical College Hostel in Ahmedabad, India
No one has done more to delve into the causes than Miten Patel, whose father Ashok, 74, died alongside his mother. For 11 months he has been waking in the small hours and creeping downstairs to investigate a new detail that has occurred to him, in an office filled with mementos and photos of his parents.
After poring through footage and documentary evidence, he is convinced a malfunction on the ageing and problem-dogged jet caused the disaster, and that the pilot was trying to clear the medical complex and land on the highway beyond.
‘If only he’d had 10 seconds more clearance, I think he’d have made it,’ he surmises. Miten’s quest for the truth is driven by the need to honour his parents’ memory, yet I also sense his simmering fury.
His parents, who had been on a Hindu pilgrimage – ironically said to open the gates to heaven – sat together in row 37.
A haunting video taken by a passenger moments before take-off shows Ashok loading baggage into the overhead compartment, while his wife Shobhana tinkers with her mobile phone.
Firefighters work at the site of the plane crash. Victims died in different ways, including by impact injuries and being suffocated by fumes
They were a devoted couple and when Miten arrived at the Civil Hospital to give his DNA sample, he was reassured that they’d been inseparable to the last.
Indeed, the Kent-based financial adviser was told, they had even been laid together in the mortuary, so that his father was the 98th person to be identified and his mother the 99th.
Comforted by this romantic story, Miten agreed to be filmed commending the hospital’s handling of the aftermath.
His glowing tribute duly appeared on the hospital’s website, a Gujarat cabinet minister’s Twitter feed, and TV news bulletins. It made for great PR but as he would soon discover, his vulnerability had been exploited and he had been duped.
For one thing, he says, his father was not number 98. No one really knew exactly when he was identified – he was just one of the first 98.
Another mistake in India came when gaseous chemicals were infused into the caskets to preserve the remains. The levels were found to be so dangerously high that
British morticians who handled them could have been killed. ‘They were happy to get me praising the hospital, Air India and the Gujarat authorities but since then there has been no apology, no one reaching out,’ Miten told me.
‘I don’t think that shows any sympathy or empathy. We’ve been left alone to figure out for ourselves why all these errors happened.’
When The Mail on Sunday put his criticisms to the hospital’s medical superintendent, Dr Rakesh Joshi, he denied mistakes were made, instead boasting that they had ‘set a world record in matching so many DNA tests within only 14 days’.
For its part, Air India told the MoS: ‘Our hearts go out to each and every family affected by this tragedy. The one-year mark of the accident will be an especially emotional and difficult time… We remain committed to supporting these families and ensuring they receive all the care they need.’
Representatives of the airline’s parent company Tata did come to meet Miten. However, he says, their agenda was simply to offer condolences. His was to ask hard questions, such as why the accident happened, whether it was preventable and who would take responsibility. He got no answers.
Like the other families, he prays they will be delivered in the final report. Whatever the investigators have uncovered, however, one fears it will be of little comfort to the tormented lone survivor.
At this time of year, the brightly painted wooden trawlers moored in Diu’s harbour are being prepared for the summer fishing season.
Poignantly, one of the boats that Vishwash Kumar Ramesh and his brother jointly owned has been renamed ‘Ajay’. But when it puts out into the Arabian Sea, the ‘miracle man’ won’t be on the quayside to wave it off.
Shut away in his Leicester bedroom, he is a prisoner of his memories. We must share his wife’s hope – that the new baby’s arrival will help him expunge the nightmarish scenes he witnessed as he made his barely believable escape.
Additional reporting by Kuldip Ishrani, in Ahmedabad, and Tracey Khandola
