The phone call came at 2am. A coroner’s officer, apologetic, cryptic. ‘There’s been a development.’ For the families of the Air India bombing victims, that call reopened a wound 35 years old.
The remains of 329 people were scattered across the Atlantic in June 1985. Most were repatriated. But some, it now emerges, may have been misidentified. One family received a coffin containing the body of an unknown man. Their mother’s name was on the death certificate. She wasn’t inside.
‘We buried a stranger,’ a relative told me yesterday, her voice flat with exhaustion. ‘We mourned the wrong person for three decades.’
The coroner’s investigation, launched quietly last autumn, centres on mortuary records from the original disaster. Sources close to the probe say paperwork was incomplete. Bodies were tagged, re-tagged, lost in the chaos. ‘It was the 1980s. No DNA. No central database. Just harried pathologists and a mountain of grief.’
Now the coroner is exhuming coffins. Quietly. No press releases. Families are being informed in staggered phone calls. The political implications are toxic. The Air India bombing was a failure of intelligence, policing, and border control. Another failure, this time forensic, would be a gift for opposition attacks.
Whitehall is nervous. The Home Office has been asked for a statement. They are ‘monitoring the situation’. Translation: praying it doesn’t blow up.
But it will. Because the families are organised. They have a lawyer. They have the press. And they have a question nobody can answer: ‘How many others are in the wrong grave?’
The coroner’s report is due in six weeks. Exactly two days before the anniversary. Coincidence? Ask the families. They don’t believe in coincidences anymore.
