Crash report upsets family

Crash report upsets family

JAKARTA (JP): The family of M. Rahman in Bali have been anxiously waiting to hear if he was indeed on board the Merpati plane which crashed on Tuesday in Molo Strait off Flores in East Nusa Tenggara.

Desy Anjani, an economics student at Pendidikan Nasional University in Denpasar, said her family had been trying to find out whether their father was among the 14 people on board the Twin Otter plane flying from Bima to Ruteng, Antara reported yesterday.

There were no survivors and rescue workers have retrieved seven bodies. Only three of them have been identified.

Newspapers could not agree on the names of who was on board the plane, Desy said.

"My father's name is M. Rahman, but newspapers gave Rahmat and Ramat. One listed the name as Rahman," she told Antara from Denpasar.

She said her father had planned to fly to Ruteng for business from Denpasar that day.

Merpati arranged to fly two members of the family to Labuanbajo, where the rescue operation is concentrated, to identify the body.

But, by Friday, Merpati had not allowed her brother and uncle to inspect the bodies the rescue workers had recovered, she said. No reason was given, but it is apparent that they may have been badly decomposed.

She insisted it wouldn't be too difficult to identify their father. "Father had a curly hair. We need to know for sure," she said.

"We don't know for sure that he was on the plane," she said, adding that her mother had been standing by the telephone for news from Labuanbajo.

"We tried to prevent father from flying to Ruteng because he had only just recovered from medical treatment in Medan," she said.

She added that if her father was on board the plane, he would be buried in his home town of Medan. (emb)