Aviation staff remember crash victims
BOUQUETS of white roses surrounded aviation staff as they gathered at Bole International Airport yesterday to remember the two pilots and six crew who perished along with 149 passengers in the Ethiopia Airlines crash a week ago.
Weeping women held slender single stems in their shaking hands. Banks of the white flowers, the traditional colour of mourning, were placed in front of a row of empty coffins at the ceremony.
A band – some of the musicians in tears – temporarily stopped playing as band members ran to comfort bereaved relatives who lunged forward, wailing in grief over the coffins.
“Our deep sorrow cannot bring them back,” an Orthodox priest in a traditional black turban and black robes told the crowd gathered outside an airport hangar.
“This is the grief of the world,” he said, as Ethiopian Airlines staff sobbed in each other’s arms.
At least the crash had taken place in Ethiopia – the holy land – he said, prompting “amens” from the crowd.
In Paris, investigators examined black box recorders to determine why the aircraft plunged into a field shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa, searching for similarities to an October Lion Air crash that killed 189 people.
Both crashes involved the same model of plane – a Boeing 737 Max 8 – causing aviation authorities to ground the model around the world after last week’s accident.
Data from the Ethiopian Airlines flight recorder had been successfully downloaded, France’s BEA air accident investigation agency said yesterday.
That information had been transferred to Ethiopian investigators, the agency said, adding that its technical work on the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder was now done.
In the Ethiopian capital, families and airline staff were focused on honouring their dead. At the airport memorial, a banner offered “deepest condolences and comfort” to the families of the deceased crew.
A female flight attendant spoke warmly of the deceased captain, Yared Getachew.
“He was a really nice person, a good person, all the words you can find to talk about a good person apply. He was a very kind human being,” she said, before dissolving in tears.
A service for the families of passengers – more than 30 nationalities were on board – was also held beneath the pink stone spires of Addis Ababa’s Holy Trinity Cathedral.
Families and relatives of the victims threw themselves on the coffins as they arrived and kissed pictures of loved ones. AT LEAST 50 members of the Afghan security forces have surrendered to the Taliban in a fight for control of Afghanistan’s western province of Badghis that has created heavy casualties, officials said.
Fighting in Afghanistan has intensified even as Taliban and US officials finished the latest round of peace talks on last Tuesday, with both sides citing progress.
Afghanistan usually sees a marked increase in violence in spring.
Some 100 Afghan personnel who are part of the interior ministry’s border police attempted to flee their posts into neighbouring Turkmenistan on Saturday, but they were prevented from entering that country, Badghis provincial council chairperson Abdul Aziz Bik said yesterday.
About 50 Afghan border police surrendered, while the remaining 50 continued fighting in the district of Bala Murghab, he said. Bala Murghab is the province’s most populous district.
“These soldiers have been fighting against the Taliban for years and if they give up, they will be killed by Taliban,” Bik said.
The district was at risk of falling to the Taliban unless Afghan forces receive air and ground reinforcements, Badghis provincial council member Abdullah Afzali said on Saturday.
Provincial councils are elected bodies that sometimes have closer connections to local residents than government officials have.
The Taliban said 90 border police had surrendered to the militant group. It posted photos on Twitter of a line-up of dozens of men who the Taliban said were captured border police, and it added that it had killed many others.
Jamshid Shahabi, a spokesperson for Badghis’ governor, said the Taliban had inflated its estimate of captured forces.
It was not clear how many total Afghan and Taliban forces had been killed or wounded in the battle for the district. But the International Committee of the Red Cross tweeted that attacks in Bala Murghab had generated heavy casualties. The Red Cross said it had facilitated the handover of the bodies of 20 soldiers to the Afghan National Army Corps.
In a tweet, the Afghan ministry of defence said its forces had killed 12 insurgents in Bala Murghab, as part of operations across 10 provinces during the previous 24 hours. A spokesperson for the ministry could not be reached for comment.