Dozens of medical school students in the western Indian state of Gujarat were eating lunch on Thursday when an Air India passenger plane, which had been 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.
“Most of the students escaped, but 10 or 12 were trapped in the fire,” she 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 from the scene shows the plane descending, almost as if on a glide, and then a fireball rises in its place.
Photos and verified videos from the scene of the plane crash show widespread carnage. Images showed medical workers carrying the bodies of victims into ambulances using stretchers.
The images also show the blackened tangle of the wreckage of the plane. The aircraft appeared to have broken into large pieces; a wing lay in the road, the tail lodged in the medical college building.
Firefighters sprayed burned-out buildings and sooty, cracked trees, video footage showed, as they stepped carefully around the hunks of debris.
At a nearby hospital, medical professionals raced through busy rooms with empty stretchers and wheelchairs, verified video showed. Crowds of people milled about in the hospitals.
Outside, a group of men walked through the streets with a stretcher carrying an injured person. Ambulance after ambulance drove by.
Mujib Mashal, Hari Kumar, Monika Cvorak and Maud Bodoukian contributed reporting.
Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
The post Chaos at Air India Crash Site appeared first on New York Times.
