Indonesian police receives 24 body bags from JT-610 crash site, says ‘patience’ needed to ID victims

The National Police say they have received 24 body bags believed to contain victims from the crash of Lion Air JT-610 flight recovered during the first day of rescue efforts yesterday.

The body bags were transported to the National Police Hospital in Jakarta for identification. However, the police conceded that, given the state of the bodies when they were recovered, some time will be needed to ID them all.

“Most of the [bodies] inside the body bags aren’t whole. I’d like to say it’s not that we’re not hopeful, but patience is needed to wait for the identification process,” National Police Hospital Chief Grand Commissioner Musyafak told reporters Monday evening, as quoted by CNN Indonesia.

Musyafak added that the number of body bags doesn’t necessarily equal the number of victims recovered thus far.

“It could be that one body bag contains more than one victim. We can’t say how many victims there are,” he said.

The National Police say one of the quickest ways to ID the victims is to match their DNA with that of their relatives, many of whom have been flown to Jakarta to aid in the process.

Previously, the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) said it’s likely all on board JT-610 were killed in the crash as the bodies they were able to retrieve yesterday were no longer intact and hours had passed, diminishing the likelihood of finding survivors.

Search efforts ceased yesterday evening and have resumed this morning, with the main focus reportedly being on finding the body of the plane, which Basarnas says is not located at the point where JT-610 lost its signal.

JT-610, which departed from Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta Airport on Oct. 29 at 6:20am and was scheduled to arrive in Bangka Belitung capital Pangkal Pinang at 7:20am, disappeared from the radar around 13 minutes after take-off.

The Aviation Agency says the flight’s pilot requested to return to Soekarno-Hatta shortly after take off before communications were lost with the plane. Basarnas then found evidence that the plane crashed in the waters of Karawang Bay off the coast of West Java soon after.