Leaders mourn plane crash victims
President Xi leads moment of silence for lives lost as accident investigation continues
President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders observed a moment of silence on March 28 to mourn the victims of the China Eastern Airlines plane crash.
The moment of silence, proposed by Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, was observed at the start of a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in Beijing.
Flight MU5735, with 132 people on board, crashed into a mountainous area in Wuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on March 21. All people aboard were on March 26 confirmed dead.
After the crash, Xi immediately ordered the launch of an emergency response, all-out search and rescue efforts, and proper handling of the aftermath.
Rescuers and investigators announced on March 28 that DNA matching for all 132 victims had been completed. Remains and belongings of the victims have been sent to the local funeral home.
After the crash, the Ministry of Public Security quickly drew up a work plan to identify the victims and established a special platform for DNA comparison, according to Liu Kaihui, an official at the ministry’s institute of forensic science.
Public security officers in more than 20 provincial-level regions were involved in collecting the DNA samples of the victims and their family members, the official said at a news conference in Wuzhou on March 28.
“Our institute dispatched a team of 30 experts to the crash site, carrying out on-site investigations together with more than 200 forensic science workers in Guangxi,” Liu said. In addition to DNA matching techniques, fingerprint experts have also compared fingerprints to confirm the victims’ identities.
Zhu Tao, head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s aviation safety office, said that as of noon on March 28, the search and rescue team had canvassed an area of about 370,000 square meters in the core and neighboring areas of the crash site, and had collected 36,001 pieces of aircraft debris.
Zheng Xi, head of the Guangxi Fire and Rescue Brigade, said the search and rescue team is now prioritizing the search for victims’ belongings and aircraft debris, as both black boxes have been found.
As decoding and analysis work for the two black boxes is ongoing, other avenues for investigation are also progressing, Zhu said, adding that the investigation team is collecting evidence.
To fully discover the truth, “it is insufficient to rely only on data from the black boxes in an air crash investigation”, he said.