The wife of the sole survivor of the Air India crash has revealed how her husband is grieving the loss of his brother who was killed in the tragedy three months ago.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, from Leicester, was on the flight headed to London that crashed minutes after taking off from India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad on June 12, killing 241 people on board and 29 on the ground.
Ramesh, who was sitting in seat 11A, walked away with only cuts to his face and some chest injuries, but has been wracked with survivor’s guilt ever since.
Speaking to The Times, his wife said he remains in India, where he continues to receive treatment, and said he is devastated by the loss of his brother Ajay, who had been sitting across the aisle when the Boeing 787 went down.
‘I’m not sure when he’s coming back to the UK as his treatment is going on. Everything happened in front of him and the main thing is he lost his brother. He’s not talking to anyone in the media, even in India.’
Ramesh, who has been dubbed the ‘miracle man’, ‘God’s child’, and a ‘symbol of hope’ by Indian media, previously said he feels ‘terrible’ he could not save his brother and feels tormented with guilt over his death.
His relatives in India previously spoke of how he struggled to sleep at night and was haunted by nightmares where he sees ‘everyone die’.
Ramesh had tried to book two seats next to each other on flight AI171.
But by the time he came to make the reservation, he was forced to pick two seats apart from each other in row 11.
Vishwash told The Sun at the time: ‘If we had been sat together we both might have survived.
‘I tried to get two seats together but someone had already got one. Me and Ajay would have been sitting together.
‘But I lost my brother in front of my eyes. So now I am constantly thinking ‘Why can’t I save my brother?’.
Vishwash carried his brother’s coffin at a ceremony in Gujarat in June. He was later seen crying in anguish and had to be taken away.
He was sitting next to one of the plane’s emergency exits, was able to crawl through a hole in the twisted fuselage of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Footage exclusively obtained by MailOnline showed Vishwash tried going back to the site of the inferno to save his brother.
Vishwash told the first emergency service worker on site: ‘My family member is in there, my brother and he’s burning to death. I have to save him.’
Emergency worker Satinder Singh Sandhu said: ‘I walked nearer to Mr Ramesh, grabbed him by the arm and led him away to a waiting ambulance.
‘I had no idea that he was a passenger on the plane and thought he was a resident of the hostel or a passer-by.
‘He was very disoriented and shocked and was limping. There was also blood on his face, but he was able to speak.
‘He told the paramedics that he was flying to London when the plane fell and that he wanted to go back to save his family.’
Shortly after the tragic crash he told Indian media: ‘I thought I would die. Everything happened in front of my eyes,’
‘I don’t know how I came out of it alive. I saw people dying in front of my eyes.’
The aircraft struck a medical college hostel in a residential part of Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people on board, 52 of whom were British.
The majority of families have received compensation from Air India worth about £21,500, and Ramesh may be entitled to claim compensation for physical injuries and the psychological trauma caused by the incident.
Two British families who received ‘other remains’ in the casket holding their relatives wrote an open letter to foreign secretary Yvette Cooper on Friday calling on her to demand answers from Indian authorities.
Miten Patel, the son of Ashok and Shobhana Patel, and Tom Donaghey, brother of Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek, wrote: ‘Not only did we lose our family members in this tragedy but have since endured the unimaginable pain of their remains being mishandled, mislabelled, commingled and in one devastating case, completely lost without any explanation or any sort of empathetic response regarding this whatsoever from the authorities in India.’
They added: ‘For the last three months, we have tried to seek answers through the proper channels, but we have been met with silence and empty gestures.’
‘We are not asking for sympathy but are asking for accountability, responsibility and action. The silence and indifference that we have faced are further traumatising and have added to our grief and sorrow. We cannot mourn in peace until accountability for these wrongs are acknowledged and addressed.’
