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)