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The mother of a gay man who was killed in the deadly June 12 Air India crash says she was incorrectly sent someone else’s body for burial. She’s now trying to locate her son’s body as other victims’ families have reported similar mishandling of their loved ones’ remains.
Amanda Donaghey, the mother of 39-year-old Fiongal Greenlaw-Meek, travelled from her home in France to India to help identify the body of her son, who died alongside his 45-year-old husband Jamie Meek in an Air India plane crash. The same-sex couple had gone to India to celebrate their wedding anniversary and had posted a video on social media hours before their plane crashed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, killing all but one of the 243 passengers aboard the Boeing aircraft.
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Donaghey travelled to India to provide a blood DNA sample to help identify her son’s remains — she wished to bury her son in a grave next to his husband’s. But while investigators gave her a casket ostensibly containing part of her son’s body, a British coroner who had run an additional DNA test informed her that the body in the casket wasn’t her son’s.
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“It was heartbreaking,” she told The Sunday Times. “We don’t know what poor person is in that casket. This is an appalling thing to have happened.”
Amanda Donaghey has heard from British officials that another one of the coffins returned to the U.K. had been found to contain the remains of multiple people. Since learning that she received the incorrect remains, she has begun doubting that she’ll ever be able to lay her son to rest alongside his husband.
“We have spent every day since then on the phone to the Foreign Office, trying to get a response on where Fiongal is,” Amanda Donaghey said. “All the time, I feel like I’m just standing on the edge of a black hole thinking, ‘Has he been disposed of?’”
“We would like to be able to do the rites necessary for Fiongal in order for us to move on as a family. And that is what is missing. We don’t know what poor person is in that casket,” she added. “And we would now like the British government to do everything in its power to find out, and bring Fiongal home.”
Twelve other caskets belonging to British nationals have been shipped to the U.K., even though 52 perished in the crash. Of those, ten contained correctly identified bodies.
James Healy-Pratt, an international aviation lawyer representing 20 families who lost loved ones in the crash, told The Sunday Times, “Losing a loved one in an air accident is traumatic in itself. These families deserve answers about how this co-mingling of DNA and misidentification of remains occurred. Discussions are ongoing with the UK police and the Foreign Office.”
Greenlaw-Meek and his husband ran the Wellness Foundry, a health and wellness lifestyle company that offers psychic readings, tarot, reiki, and yoga in the English cities of London and Ramsgate. The couple began dating in 2019 and married in various ceremonies in 2022.
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Source: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/07/her ... s-to-bury/