Dozens of medical school students in the western Indian state of Gujarat were eating lunch on Thursday when an Air India passenger plane carrying 242 people to London crashed into their dining hall. In the aftermath of the disaster, the ripped tail of the wrecked plane could be seen jutting out of the building.
At least five students died in the crash in the city of Ahmedabad, said Minakshi Parikh, the dean of B.J. Medical College, whose campus is near the end of the runway of the airport. Officials feared that the death toll at the medical campus and its neighboring buildings could be higher.
“Most of the students escaped, but 10 or 12 were trapped in the fire,”Ms. Parikh said.
At least 204 people were killed in the crash of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, G.S. Malik, the police commissioner of Ahmedabad, said in an interview. That makes the crash India’s deadliest aviation disaster since 1996.
Verified video shows the plane descending, almost as if on a glide, and then a fireball rises in its place. Photos and verified videos from the crash site show widespread carnage and medical workers carrying the bodies of victims into ambulances on stretchers.
Dr. Bharat Ahir, who reached the scene soon after the crash, said he had seen rescuers bringing people out of thick smoke. Inside the damaged dinning hall, he said, the meals of many of the students sat unfinished.
Dt. Ahir said he feared that casualties in a nearby residential complex, a multistory block where doctors’ and their families live, might outnumber those at the dinning facility.
“The plane’s back part is stuck in the dinning hall, and the front hit the residential building,” he said.
Images emerging from the scene show the blackened tangle of the wreckage of the plane. The aircraft appeared to have broken into large pieces, with one wing lying on a roadway. Firefighters could be seen spraying burned-out buildings and sooty, cracked trees as they stepped carefully around the hunks of debris.
At a nearby hospital, medical workers raced through busy rooms with empty stretchers and wheelchairs, verified video showed. Crowds of people milled about.
Outside, a group of men walked through the streets with a stretcher carrying an injured person. Ambulance after ambulance drove by.
Mujib Mashal, Monika Cvorak and Maud Bodoukian contributed reporting.
Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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