In Air India crash, canteen worker hopes for 'second miracle'

By Sudipto Ganguly

AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) -Around 30 minutes before an Air India jet crashed into a college hostel in India, Ravi Thakor, the cook in the hostel canteen, and his wife stepped out to deliver lunchboxes - leaving behind their two-year-old daughter and his mother.

The grandmother and child are missing. Thakor is hoping for what he calls a "second miracle", one like the astonishing survival of the sole passenger among the 242 people on board the plane.

Thakor said he first thought the loud bang he heard when the plane crashed on Thursday in the western city of Ahmedabad was a gas cylinder blast, but soon noticed the building he had just left was engulfed in flames. For days, he's been searching for his mother and his daughter at hospitals and the morgue to no avail.

Police told Reuters they were treating it as a missing persons case.

"If one of the plane passengers could survive the crash, there could be a second miracle and my mother and daughter could also be safe," a visibly distraught Thakor told Reuters outside one of the hospitals. His wife Lalita stood beside him, stone-faced.

"We realise that the chances of finding them alive are bleak but we have not given up hope," Thakor said.

In all, at least 271 people died in the crash - the 241 passengers and crew in the plane, and the rest people on the ground, mostly in the hostel building.

Thakor and his wife have given samples of their DNA to hospital authorities but they are yet to hear if any matches have been found among the deceased.

Families of victims have been waiting to take posession of their loved ones' remains for days as DNA profiling and other identification checks are taking time. The hospital's additional superintendent, Rajnish Patel, said on Sunday DNA samples of only 32 deceased have been matched so far.

When the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner jet struck the hostel canteen on Thursday, many students were eating lunch. Steel tumblers and plates still containing food lay on the few tables that were left intact when Reuters visited the site later.

Thakor's mother was still cooking when he and his wife left the hostel that day to deliver lunchboxes and he had just rocked rocked his daugher to sleep on a wooden swing, he said. "It is possible someone took away my daughter in the chaos that followed," he said.

Of the 242 on board the plane, the only passenger who managed to survive was Viswashkumar Ramesh, 40, who squeezed through the broken hatch after the plane crashed and emerged with only minor injuries.

(Writing by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)