Members of Britain’s Gujarati community will gather on Saturday to mourn and remember loved ones killed in the Air India plane disaster.
Of the 241 people on the plane who died, 52 were British citizens, and several others lived in England and had been headed to London from Ahmedabad, the largest city in the Indian state of Gujarat.
The cause of the crash — the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade — is under investigation, with British and American teams supporting officials in India as recovery work continues at the site.
Connections between Britain and Ahmedabad, where Flight AI171 took off on Thursday afternoon before crashing seconds later, run deep. More than 600,000 British Gujaratis are thought to live in the United Kingdom today. Some came via Uganda in the 1970s, after the dictator Idi Amin expelled his country’s Asian population and Britain gave refuge to around 27,000 people. They settled in towns and cities including London and Leicester, in the Midlands. Others came from India in the 1950s and ’60s.
One of the largest communities is in Harrow, northwest London, where the International Siddhashram Shakti Center plans to hold a memorial service on Saturday afternoon. Although it is a Hindu temple, people of all faiths and none have been invited to join the interfaith prayer and candlelight vigil for victims.
Later on Saturday, another memorial is set to be held by the Brent Indian Association at its headquarters in Wembley, four miles away. Memorial services at Hindu temples, mosques and churches have been taking place across Britain.
In the Midlands city of Leicester, home to the disaster’s sole survivor, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, friends and relatives were mourning his brother Ajay, who was also on the plane along with several other passengers from the city.
At the Shree Hindu Temple and Community Centre, a few minutes’ walk from the family home, women were praying for the dead on Friday afternoon.
Kishan Acharya, a priest at the temple, said that he and many members of his congregation are Gujarati and were “experiencing trauma” over the disaster.
Mr. Ramesh’s uncle is on the temple’s committee, he said, while other local temples had told him they had also lost worshipers.
“So many devotees came today and the only thing that was in their mouth was about this air crash; who was related to who,” Mr. Acharya said. “There were so many people from Leicester who were on the flight.”
“People are shocked, they are not able to digest it,” he added. “They are not able to believe what happened.”
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