The Indonesian National Police are urging for patience as they say they will take as much time as necessary to identify all of the victims from the crash of Lion Air JT-610.
As reported by CNN Indonesia today, the police say their Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team will not be rushed in their quest to properly identify the victims and are appealing for patience especially from the victims’ families.
“There is no time limit on the victim identification process,” National Police Spokesperson Yusri Yunus said during a press conference by DVI today, adding that the process will not stop until all 189 on the flight manifest or all of the body parts recovered from the crash site are identified.
According to the DVI team, they have positively identified 71 victims as of today, consisting of 52 males and 19 females. Search teams have thus far recovered 194 body bags from the crash site, though that doesn’t necessarily equal the number of bodies recovered as many of them were found in pieces.
JT-610, which departed 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. The National Search and Rescue Agency then found evidence that the plane crashed in the waters of Karawang Bay off the coast of West Java soon after.
An analysis of the flight recorder data from one of the black boxes recovered from the crash revealed that the plane’s airspeed indicator had been malfunctioning on its last four flights.
However, it is not yet clear how much of the blame rests with Lion Air versus Boeing. The latter on Wednesday issued an advice for operators of their new 737 MAX jet models about possible instrument failure that is believed to have caused JT-610’s crash.
