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Wreckage of the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft
The mother of Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek was told in India her DNA matched remains found at the crash site, but a coroner in the U.K. said that isn't true.
The mother of a gay man killed in an Air India crash in June flew to the crash site to ensure she could bring his remains home and bury him beside his husband. Then British authorities said the wrong remains came back.
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Fiongal and Jamie Ray Greenlaw-Meek had been in India celebrating a wedding anniversary but died on the trip home when the plane crashed, killing 242 people. Amanda Donaghey, Fiongal’s mother, told The Times she traveled to India and provided a blood sample to help identify her son through a DNA match.
Three days after she first went to the crash site in Ahmedabad, authorities told her a positive match was found. She traveled back to his home in the U.K. with what she was told was the remains of her son. The plan was to bury him beside Jamie Ray, whose body had already been returned and buried.
Related: Gay couple returning home to England among those killed in Air India crash
“I arrived back in London Gatwick with the assurance that Fiongal was in the casket,” she said.
But when a British coroner tested the DNA again, the results did not match.
“We don’t know what poor person is in that casket. This is an appalling thing to have happened,” Donaghey told the paper.
The death of Fiongal and Jamie Ray earned wide media attention partly because of a social media video Fiongal posted from the airport shortly before the flight. The couple ran The Wellness Foundry, which was founded in 2018. The couple married in 2022.
Fiongal isn’t the only casualty from the Air India crash whose remains were apparently misidentified at the crash site.
Miten Patel, whose parents also died in the crash, had brought back a coffin he thought had the remains of mother Shobhana Patel, but told the BBC it was later confirmed “other remains” were also in the coffin.
India told the BBC all remains were handled with “utmost professionalism” after the crash.
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