Bishops mourn victims of Air India plane crash

The Catholic bishops in India have offered condolences and expressed solidarity with the victims and the families of an Air India flight that crashed on June 12, shortly after taking off from the western city of Ahmedabad. At least 241 of the 242 people on board were killed when the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed in a residential area, just outside Ahmedabad Airport in the state’s commercial capital. “The death toll may increase” as several on the ground and nearby buildings are affected, G.S. Malik, Ahmedabad Police Commissioner, told the media. The only surviving passenger, Vishwas Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British citizen of Indian origin, is recovering in a hospital. “The entire Catholic Community of Gujarat is aghast,” Archbishop Thomas Macwan of Gandhinagar, based in the state capital, told UCA News on June 12. He said he was in his office, barely 20 kilometres away from the crash site, “when the news came in, and my heart was crying.” The prelate said he also learnt that five to six Indian Christians, including a recently married Christian couple from a village in the Ahmedabad diocese, had died in the crash. Macwan said he had known Gujarat state’s former chief minister Vijay Rupani, who tragically died in the mishap, and described him as “a good man.”