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View all search resultsFirst AirAsia victim identified
Consoling: Relatives weep during the handover ceremony of the body of Hayati Lutfiah, one of the victims of AirAsia flight QZ8501, to her family at the police hospital in Surabaya on Thursday, consoled by Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini (second left)
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span class="caption">Consoling: Relatives weep during the handover ceremony of the body of Hayati Lutfiah, one of the victims of AirAsia flight QZ8501, to her family at the police hospital in Surabaya on Thursday, consoled by Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini (second left). AP/Dita Alangkara
On the fifth day after the ill-fated AirAsia flight QZ8501 crashed into the Karimata Strait while en route to Singapore from Surabaya, the first victim's body was identified on Thursday.
The East Java Police's Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team said it had been able to identify one of the first two bodies retrieved from the waters by the joint search and rescue team on Tuesday.
'A body labeled B001 has been identified as Hayati Lutfiah Hamid,' the team's head, Comr. Sr. Budiyono, said in Surabaya, East Java.
Hayati was an elementary school teacher in Surabaya.
The DVI team came to the conclusion after matching fingerprints and scars from surgery, which were found on the body, with ante-mortem data and information, he said.
'An ID card with the name Hayati Lutfiah was also found in the victim's clothes when the search and rescue team found her. She was wearing a necklace with her initials on it and a bracelet that family members confirmed belonged to Hayati,' said Budiyono.
The team, however, has yet to identify the second body, labeled B002.
'We haven't obtained enough evidence to confirm the identity of the victim. This is due to a comparison of ante-mortem and post-mortem data that has not given clear results,' he said.
The DVI team has been able to confirm that B002 is a young Mongoloid male about 145 to 150 centimeters tall with black hair no longer than 6 cm and a mole on his left shoulder.
Besides these two bodies, four more bodies, two men and two women, had arrived at the Bhayangkara Hospital in Surabaya for identification on Thursday. The bodies were flown from Pangkalan Bun in Central Kalimantan where victims' bodies and plane debris are typically sent before being examined.
The National Police's DVI unit executive director, Sr. Comr. Anton Castilani, said one of the two female bodies was reportedly wearing red clothing similar to the uniform of an AirAsia flight attendant.
The identification team at the hospital consists of 25 doctors specializing in the fields of pathology, DNA identification and fingerprint identification and have been recruited from Surabaya's Airlangga University, Bhayangkara Hospital, Dr. Soetomo Hospital, the National Police and East Java Health Agency.
The joint rescue team had recovered an additional three bodies, National Search and Rescue Team (Basarnas) head Air Chief Marshall Henry Bambang Soelistyo said.
'Two bodies are still in Pangkalan Bun and we're planning to fly them to Surabaya tonight. The last one is still on board the Navy's KRI Yos Sudarso. All three bodies are female,' he said at his office in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta.
The search and rescue team also retrieved six objects from the location, consisting of two black bags, one grey suitcase, a piece of a ladder, a diving oxygen tank and metal shrapnel, according to Bambang.
Similar to previous days, Thursday's operation was hindered by bad weather, with the tide reaching four meters in height. 'We're still going to be facing this kind of weather until at least Jan. 4,' Bambang said.
Bad weather had also prevented the KNKT (National Transportation Safety Committee), which deployed its team to Pangkalan Bun, from locating the aircraft's black box, which will hopefully explain the mystery behind the incident.
KNKT senior investigator Mardjono Siswosuwarno said the team of 18 people, 14 of whom are supposed to locate the black box and four of whom are supposed to identify debris, had not started their operations.
'The hydrophone [which detects signals from the black box] has to be submerged in the water and we cannot do it from a big ship because the sound of the propellers and engine would skew the signals from the black box,' he told The Jakarta Post.
Following the incident, a random urine test was conducted by the Transportation Ministry in Denpasar, Bali, which showed that an AirAsia pilot tested positive for morphine on Thursday.
AirAsia Indonesia CEO Sunu Widyatmoko said that the test results of the captain, who piloted flight QZ7510 from Jakarta to Denpasar on Thursday, could be related to the pilot's recent discharge from the hospital due to typhus.
