Rumoured survivors stretch hope in agonising wait

ISLAMABAD: “Just tell me one thing, is my brother alive or death?” A middle-aged woman standing outside the emergency ward of Pims cried out. She went around, outside the hospital, pleading everyone to give her information. Her brother, a student, was on the ill-fated Airblue flight ED-202, when it went down with 152 people on board at 9:45am on Wednesday.

“Why is no one is telling me anything?” The lady cried as she burst into tears.

The situation at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) was tense. Relatives and friends thronged outside the emergency ward, hoping that their loved ones would be amongst the rumoured survivors.

Khawaja Faheem’s maternal uncle, Khalid Mehmood, was also on board the Airblue flight. He called back home and instructed his kin not to tell Mehmood’s family back in Karachi anything until there was more information. Mehmood, a father of three, was travelling to visit his mother in Pims, who had been hospitalised.

“He called us in the morning at around 7: 30am and said he will be reaching Islamabad at around 9:30 am,” Faheem told The Express Tribune. Faheem added that they called their uncle when they heard about the crash. “Someone picked up the phone and said hello, before the call was dropped,” he added.

Their hopes were crushed two hours later when the authorities announced that no one had survived the crash.

Baqarullah rushed to the hospital after getting a call from his son who was at the airport to receive Mohammad Owais, a student of ACCA and B Com, and his maternal uncle.

Owais, who had recently tied the knot with his UK-based cousin, was coming back to Islamabad after spending his vacations in Karachi. “All of us had urged him to move to UK but he wanted to stay in Pakistan. He loved his country,” said Baqarullah.

He expressed his anger over lack of information. “Some of my relatives are sitting at Polyclinic Hospital, some at CMH Rawalpindi and some at the Islamabad Airport. But no one is telling us anything,” he said, as he took out his phone to make another call.

The relatives of Waqas, an MBA graduate, and Sapna Munawar, an air hostess on the plane, were in a similar plight. They ran around for hours, pleading for someone to tell them something, before the authorities finally declared at noon that everyone on board had perished.

These people had to wait for an agonizing two hours before they were finally told that their loved ones did not survive the crash- that most of them had been torn asunder by the impact and their bodies burnt beyond recognition; that it might even be days before they are able to take the charred remains of their loved ones back home for burial.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th, 2010.