‘There was nothing left’: Agony deepens for 737 victims’ families

A crater surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by police marks the spot where Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plunged to earth after a terrifying six-minute flight, killing 157 people and sending Boeing, the plane’s manufacturer, into turmoil. In the seven weeks since the disaster, the grief of family members has been joined by growing frustration over what they say is a lack of information from authorities and the failure to receive the remains of their loved ones. “We don’t know if they have our daughter’s body. We don’t know if they have pieces of her body,” Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo died in the crash, said in an interview. She says she’s spoken to mothers of other victims who also crave some “physical confirmation.” The Ethiopian government says human tissue has been gathered by a team led by Interpol and Blake Emergency Services, a Derbyshire, England-based company that specializes in identifying victims of disasters that will test the material for DNA. The government has said it would provide temporary death certificates, which could help with insurance and probate. Precise identification will be difficult because of the nature of the March 10 crash. Robert A. Jensen, chairman of Kenyon International Emergency Services, a Houston-based disaster-management firm not involved in the Ethiopian crash, said the site clean up appeared to happen so quickly that some materials may never be recovered. Processing such a site would normally take weeks or months. Crews need to dig until they reach dirt that wasn’t damaged, he said. Asrat Begashaw and Biniam Demssie, spokesmen for the state-owned Ethiopian Airlines, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment on the cleanup or comments of family members. <br/>