‘I stood up and ran’: Survivor of Air India crash jumped out of emergency exit, police say

NEW DELHI – Mr Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the only known survivor out of the 242 people on board an Air India plane that

crashed in Ahmedabad

on June 12, had been sitting near an emergency exit of the London-bound flight and managed to jump out, police said.

Speaking from his hospital bed, the 40-year-old told Indian media that he was a British national and was travelling to Britain with his brother after visiting family in India.

“When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital,” Mr Vishwash told the Hindustan Times.

Social media footage shown on Indian news channels showed a man in a bloodstained white T-shirt and dark trousers limping on a street and being helped by a medic.

The man had bruises on his face and a goatee, resembling photographs of Mr Vishwash in hospital after the crash that were published by local media.

Reuters could not immediately verify the video, in which people gathered around the man and asked him where were the other passengers, to which he replied “they are all inside”.

A photo of Mr Vishwash’s boarding pass shown online by the Hindustan Times showed that he was in seat 11A of the plane bound for Gatwick Airport.

He told the paper that his brother Ajay had been seated in a different row on the plane and asked for help to find him.

Speaking about Mr Vishwash, Ahmedabad senior police officer Vidhi Chaudhary said: “He was near the emergency exit and managed to escape by jumping out the emergency door.”

“I don’t believe how I survived. For some time, I thought I was also going to die,” Mr Vishwash told Indian state broadcaster DD News on June 13.

“But when I opened my eyes, I realised I was alive and I tried to unbuckle myself from the seat and escape from where I could. It was in front of my eyes that the air hostess and others (died).”

Mr Vishwash said the Boeing plane appeared to come to a standstill in midair for a few seconds shortly after take-off, and the green and white cabin lights were turned on.

He said he could feel the engine thrust increasing, but then the plane “crashed with speed into the hostel”.

“The side of the plane I was in landed on the ground, and I could see that there was space outside the aircraft, so when my door broke, I tried to escape through it, and I did,” Mr Vishwash said.

“The opposite side of the aircraft was blocked by the building wall, so nobody could have come out of there.”

He said he walked out of the crash site with only burn injuries on his left arm.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who arrived in his home state of Gujarat to visit the crash site, also met Mr Vishwash in the hospital on June 13.

A member of Mr Vishwash’s family based in Britain, who requested anonymity, told Reuters over the phone that he had survived and the family was in touch with him, but declined to share further details.

Mr Ajay Valgi, a cousin of Mr Vishwash who lives in Leicester, central England, told the BBC that Mr Vishwash spoke by phone to confirm he was all right.

“He only said that he was fine, nothing else,” Mr Valgi said, adding that the family had not heard anything about the brother.

“We are not doing well. We are all upset,” he said.

Mr Vishwash is married and has a son, he added.

The aircraft came down in a residential area, crashing onto a medical college hostel outside the airport during lunch hour, in the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade.

More than 260 people were killed in the crash. The dead included some people on the ground.

Police said Mr Vishwash was the sole passenger known so far to have survived but added that rescue operations were still ongoing.

“Chances are that there might be more survivors among the injured who are being treated in the hospital,” officer Chaudhary said. REUTERS