A baby’s basket, children’s shoes and family snaps.. poignant remains of Flight ET302

THERE was an Anne of Green Gables novel, a young girl’s shoe, a doll’s dress and a chief executive’s credit card.

A few yards away was part of a baby’s airline cot, family snaps, a red bag emblazoned with “GoodLife Fitness” and a handwritten note to someone called Gilav.

They were some of the items belonging to the 157 people who perished when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed on a remote hillside shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa on Sunday.

At the crash site yesterday, huge birds scavenged loudly among the wreckage and the stench of aviation fuel still hung in the air.

The plane had broken up completely on impact, with thousands of pieces of green, mangled fuselage strewn across a wide area.

Strong winds blew thousands of personal items over nearby farmland in the hills high above the town of Bishoftu.

Burnt napkins and singed inflight magazine pages littered nearby fields.

Grieving relatives sat weeping as a team of investigators continued to sift through the wreckage.

One of the plane’s giant landing wheels was still virtually intact. Another was shredded to pieces.

Hundreds of items of clothing from the plane had been piled up behind a 40ft-deep crater formed when the plane went down.

Investigators had used two giant diggers to pull bodies and the plane’s black boxes from the soil.

As the investigation continued, more tragic details about the dead emerged

An Indian newlywed received a text from his wife while she was on board. But she was dead before he was able to reply.