Bhoja Air tragedy: Families of victims demand Rs6b payout

Approach IHC for damages from airline, directors and insurance company.

KARACHI:

Eight families, which lost their loved ones in the Bhoja Air crash on April 20, 2012, have approached the Islamabad High Court (IHC), asking for over Rs6 billion in damages from the airline, its directors and the insurance company.

This compensation is far more than what the airline is offering to the bereaved families and has been calculated on the basis of the earning potential of the killed passengers if they had lived.

“We are very hopeful in getting the damages,” said Advocate Omer Farouk Adam, the lawyer representing the families. “I know such cases are unprecedented in Pakistan. However, we are making headway.”

The cases were filed in April 2014 and the families are determined to fight them till the very end, he said.

Similar compensation suits have been filed by around a dozen families of Airblue crash victims in the same court. But they have yet to be come up for the hearing.

“That’s because IHC is short of judges. Once the hearing date is fixed, I am hoping a commission will be formed to ascertain the compensation amount,” Adam said.

“The pressure we built compelled the government to release the investigation report into the Airblue crash. Our efforts haven’t been fruitless.”

Under the Carriage by Air Act 2012, airlines are liable to pay Rs5 million in insurance compensation for each life lost. This has been paid to almost all the families of Bhoja Air.

But the petitioners said that they were coerced into signing an illegal release deed to get that money. That deed basically says that whoever signs the documents and receives the compensation will not pursue a legal case against the airline, aircraft maker Boeing, Civil Aviation Authority, engine maker Pratt and Whitney and other allied companies.

“Our legal system doesn’t realise that there is a distinction between what is guaranteed under insurance and the damages, which a family can claim,” says Naseem Ahmed, a former air crash investigator, who is also assisting families seeking damages in the Sindh High Court.

“In other countries, parents, who lose a son, demand compensation for the potential income he would have earned over his lifetime. There are also emotional and psychological costs, which are hard to be fixed in numbers.”

In the case against Bhoja Air, Kainaaf Hussain, who lost 27-year-old son Gulfaraz, has made a similar plea.

The petition says Gulfaraz had completed higher studies from Allama Iqbal Open University and was helping his father expand the family’s real estate business. The family wants a compensation of Rs2.19 billion.

Bhoja was insured by Karachi-based Reliance Insurance, which had reinsured the exposure with the Russian company Ingosstrakh Insurance.

At least one family in the Airblue accident, which involved its plane crashing in Islamabad in 2010, had won compensation in the US. The airline’s leasing company was pushed into an out-of-court settlement running into tens of millions of dollars, according to people close to the case.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 8^th, 2014.

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