Bodies From Plane Crash Returned to South Korea

The remains of the 13 South Kor­­ean victims of the PMT Air crash in Kampot province last week were repatriated to Seoul on June 29, the South Korean Em­bassy said July 1.

Shortly after 9:30 pm, 23 family members accompanied the 13 coffins in 13 individual cars to Phnom Penh International Air­port for the 1 am Korean Air flight, said an embassy official who asked not to be named.

As the bodies were being taken from Incheon Inter­national Airport in Seoul shortly before 8 am Kor­ean time June 30, a grandmother who had lost her daughter, son-in-law and two of their children in the crash wept uncontrollably and fainted, South Ko­rean news agen­cy Yonhap re­port­ed.

The Antonov An-24 killed all 22 aboard—including three Czechs, a pilot variously reported as being either Russian or Uzbek and five Cambo­dians—when it crashed June 25 into a Kampot mountainside.

Information from the two flight recorders onboard PMT Air Flight U4 241 should be received in about two weeks, a civil aviation official said. The cockpit voice and flight data recorders, commonly referred to as “black boxes,” record information about individual flights and are used to reconstruct events leading to an accident.

“The black boxes will be sent to Russia next week to check the recorded information,” said Him Sarun, cabinet chief at the State Secretariat for Civil Aviation.

PMT Air Director Sar Sareth said that inquiries by his company’s insurer were ongoing and decisions on possible compensation over the crash had not been made.

 

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