Officials were using samples from relatives to identify many of the remains pulled from the rubble and smoldering wreckage after the flight went down in a congested neighborhood of Karachi.
The bodies were pulled one by one from the ruins of damaged buildings and the smoldering wreckage of the Pakistan International Airlines plane that had crashed a day earlier into a crowded neighborhood of Karachi: 97 of them by Saturday.
Many were charred beyond recognition, leaving families — some clutching pictures of their loved ones — to depend on DNA reports from a laboratory to identify those they had lost. Most of the relatives had spent the night before at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, the city’s largest government hospital, and on Saturday in hot weather at the crash site in the Model Colony neighborhood, waiting for the grim word.
To help with the identifications, DNA samples from relatives of 40 victims had been submitted at the forensic lab at the University of Karachi, officials said. Nineteen bodies were identified and handed over to the relatives after DNA extraction and identification, according to health officials, and post-mortems were being carried out on the rest of the passengers of the plane, an Airbus A320 belonging to the national airline.
Imran Ali’s 32-year old nephew, Armaghan Ali, was one of the people onboard the ill-fated plane. He said in an interview on Saturday, “Several family members tried their best to recognize his body among several corpses, but bodies are burned and massively disfigured.” So Mr. Ali provided a blood sample from his sister to help identify his nephew, and he was still waiting for the results.
“He was working with the country’s mega housing firm in Lahore and was coming to celebrate Eid with the family,” Mr. Ali said.
The crash has cast a pall on the nation a day before Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting.
