Grim Search For Relatives Mass Funeral Planned For Indonesia Victims

Heartbroken relatives roamed among coffins and cloaked body parts in a jungle morgue Sunday, trying to find loved ones killed in Indonesia’s worst air crash before unidentified victims are buried in graves with no names.

Nearly 50 bodies, mutilated beyond recognition, were readied for a mass funeral today in a cemetery that already memorializes plane crash victims.

Authorities said 187 victims have been identified.

All 234 people aboard, including four Americans, were killed when the Garuda Airlines Airbus A-3000B-4 slammed into the jungle near haze-shrouded Medan airport Friday afternoon. The crash is one in a string of disasters to hit Indonesia in recent days.

All bodies have been recovered from the jungle undergrowth and mud, Maj. Gen. Rizal Nurdin told The Associated Press late Sunday. He said soldiers are continuing to search for the flight data recorders, which could explain why the plane went down during its approach to the Sumatra island airport.

Visibility-reducing smog caused by hundreds of forest and brush fires in Indonesia is one of the possible causes being investigated, although an airport official said the plane had been on instrument approach for the main runway.

The fires were set purposely two months ago by plantations and timber companies to clear land. But they have burned out of control, and their smoky haze has spread to parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand and the Philippines, disrupting air traffic, closing schools and causing illnesses.

Investigators also are trying to determine if the haze played a role in three recent ship collisions in Indonesia’s Strait of Malacca, the most serious of which occurred Friday, leaving 29 crew members missing and presumed drowned.

In the latest disaster, a magnitude 6 earthquake rocked the Indonesian island of Sulawesi on Sunday, killing 14 people and seriously injuring 30.

President Suharto ordered a mass funeral for unidentified plane crash victims today at 10 a.m. at the Mamborano Monument, a cemetery near Medan airport which contains 57 victims of a 1979 Garuda commuter plane crash.

The haze that had blanketed Medan on Friday and Saturday, cutting visibility to 100 yards at times, lifted enough Sunday to allow 300 mourners to fly in to claim the dead. Fifty-seven bodies were loaded onto two planes for flights back to the capital, Jakarta, where white vans waited to take them to mortuaries.

Wati Batiar searched in vain Sunday for the body of her husband, who was to have phoned her in Jakarta when the Airbus landed.

“I was waiting for his call from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 8 o’clock at night, when I knew it was not going to come,” she said. “I still have not been able to find his body - that’s the worst thing.”

In an open area outside Adam Malik Hospital, she and other mourners covered their faces with masks and cloths as they walked along rows of unidentified remains.

Occasionally, a body was recognized. Family members clutched one another and sobbed or collapsed in wails as they bent over the casket.

Batiar walked soberly, lifting a fly-covered coffin lid, then the edge of a tarpaulin, scrutinizing each mangled corpse for a familiar strip of shirt or clot of hair that might indicate her husband’s body.