‘I thought I would die’: Sole survivor from Air India plane crash speaks out
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LONDON — Vishwaskumar Ramesh, the only survivor of the Air India plane crash headed to the United Kingdom from Ahmedabad, India, that left all 241 other passengers and crew dead, along with five more on the ground, said he “thought I would die” as he recovers in the hospital a day after the tragedy.
“Everything happened in front of my eyes. I thought I would die,” Ramesh told NDTV in an exclusive interview on Friday. “The side where I was seated fell into the ground floor of the building. There was some space. When the door broke, I saw that space and I just jumped out.”
“The door must’ve broken on impact,” Ramesh continued. “There was a wall on the opposite side, but near me, it was open. I ran. I don’t know how. I don’t know how I came out of it alive. For a while, I thought I was about to die. But when I opened my eyes, I saw I was alive, and I opened my seat belt and got out of there. The airhostess … died before my eyes.”
The Air India airliner carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members was en route to the United Kingdom and crashed into a building shortly after takeoff on Thursday, leaving 246 dead, officials said.
The victims include 241 passengers and crew members as well as five medical students who were inside the medical college and hospital the aircraft crashed into, according to hospital officials. Many others inside the building were injured — some seriously — and are receiving treatment, hospital officials said.
Ramesh’s brother, Nayankumar Ramesh, said it is a “miracle” his brother survived.
“He said, ‘Our plane’s crashed, I don’t know where my brother is. I don’t see any other passengers. I don’t know how I’m alive, how I exited the plane,” Nayankumar Ramesh told ABC News about his brother’s escape from the plane. “Just hearing about the crash, I’m scared to fly now, to even stay on a plane now.”
The plane, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, crashed in the Meghaninagar area near Ahmedabad airport, in India’s Gujarat state, the city’s Police Commissioner G.S. Malik said Thursday.
Boeing’s Dreamliner planes had not previously been involved in an incident where passenger fatalities were reported. This plane had more than 41,000 hours of flying time, which is considered average for this aircraft, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
“Our deepest condolences go out to the loved ones of the passengers and crew on board Air India Flight 171, as well as everyone affected in Ahmedabad. I have spoken with Air India Chairman N. Chandrasekaran to offer our full support, and a Boeing team stands ready to support the investigation led by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau,” Boeing President and CEO Kelly Ortberg said in a statement.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a statement that he’d been in touch with local officials after the crash.
“The tragedy in Ahmedabad has stunned and saddened us,” he said in a statement on social media. “It is heartbreaking beyond words. In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected by it.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Venezuelan 2-year-old who was kept in U.S. government custody after her parents were deported has been returned to Venezuela.
In a video posted to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s YouTube page, Maduro is seen greeting the toddler upon the toddler’s return.
The toddler, Maikelys Antonella Espinoza, is seen in the video being carried by Venezuelan first lady Cilia Flores before being handed over to the toddler’s mother, Yorley Inciarte, who had been deported two weeks ago from the United States.
Espinoza’s return comes after Maduro and other Venezuelan government officials accused the Trump administration of kidnapping the 2-year old.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security labeled Inciarte and her partner Maiker Espinoza Escalona as “Tren de Aragua parents,” alleging the two are members of the Venezuelan criminal gang.
Escalona was sent to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador on March 30 under Title 8 authorities. Inciarte was deported two weeks ago to Venezuela without her daughter.
“The child’s father, Maiker Espinoza-Escalona is a lieutenant of Tren De Aragua who oversees homicides, drug sales, kidnappings, extortion, sex trafficking and operates a torture house,” DHS said in a statement. “The child’s mother, Yorely Escarleth Bernal Inciarte oversees recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution.”
“Everything is false,” Inciarte told ABC News in an interview last week. “Here I am waiting for the evidence they have because if they are accusing me, it’s because they have proof of what they are saying — but here I am waiting.”
“When my partner and my daughter arrive here, the only thing I think about is staying here in my country, because the only one who supported me and fought alongside me was my country, no one else,” Inciarte said. “And I will never, ever abandon my homeland. I won’t even mention the United States, it will never come up. Because what I experienced in that country was so horrible, I don’t even want to talk about how bad it is.”
(LONDON) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday again claimed “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear program during the NATO summit in the Netherlands, escalating his pushback on an early Pentagon intelligence report suggesting joint U.S.-Israeli strikes may have set back Iran’s nuclear program back by only a matter of months.
“I believe it was total obliteration,” Trump told reporters speaking alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in The Hague, Netherlands.
A preliminary analysis of the strikes by the Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. Central Command prompted questions as the efficacy of the operation. Two people familiar with the report told ABC News it suggested the strikes did limited damage and that Iran was able to relocate highly enriched uranium stocks before the strikes occurred.
Later on Wednesday, during a solo news conference, Trump continued to push back on that analysis and claimed American pilots who carried out the strikes were being demeaned by news reports about the Pentagon’s preliminary assessment.
“Since then, we’ve collected additional intelligence,” he said. “We’ve also spoken to people who have seen the site, and the site is obliterated, and we think everything nuclear is down there. They didn’t take it out.”
“They presented something that wasn’t finished,” Trump said of U.S. intelligence reports on the impact of the U.S. strikes. Over the course of the news conference, Trump highlighted Israeli and Iranian reports of the damage caused by the strike.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said Wednesday that the country’s nuclear facilities had been “badly damaged,” as quoted by the Associated Press — which Trump repeated.
On Iran, Trump told reporters he’s not interested in restarting negotiations and didn’t view it as “necessary.” Though he also said that the U.S. would be talking with Iran “next week” and “we may sign an agreement. I don’t know.
“I don’t see them being back involved in the nuclear business anymore,” Trump said of Tehran.
Trump earlier Wednesday insisted Iran’s nuclear program had been set back “basically decades,” adding, “It’s gone for years.”
“I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out, because we acted fast,” Trump said. “If it would have taken two weeks, maybe. But it’s very hard to remove that kind of material, very hard and very dangerous. Plus, they knew we were coming, and if they know we’re coming, they’re not going to be down there.”
Asked if they could rebuild and whether the U.S. would strike again, Trump said that would be someone else’s problem.
“I’m not going to have to worry about that,” he said. “It’s gone for years, years, very tough to rebuild, because the whole thing is collapsed. In other words, inside, it’s all collapsed. Nobody can get in to see it, because it’s collapsed.”
Asked if he trusted U.S. intelligence, the president said the initial report was “very inconclusive. The intelligence says we don’t know, it could have been very severe, that’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know.’ It was very severe. It was obliteration.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio also spoke in support of the president’s position, having accompanied Trump to The Hague.
Like Trump, Hegseth (whom the president described as the “secretary of war”) claimed what he called “fake news” about the Pentagon assessment as demeaning the B-2 pilots who carried out the strikes.
“These pilots these refuels these fighters, these air defenders, the skill and the courage took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people in the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom,” Hegseth said, speaking next to Trump at his news conference.
The defense secretary also rejected the early Pentagon analysis of the damage done by the military operation.
“Given the 30,000 pounds of explosives and capability of those munitions, it was devastation underneath Fordo,” Hegseth said.
“Any assessment that tells you it was something otherwise is speculating with other motives,” Hegseth continued. “And we know that because when you actually look at the report, by the way, it was a top secret report, it was preliminary, it was low confidence.”
Hegseth suggested the leak of the report had “a political motive,” adding, “We’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes.”
Rubio also claimed that the leak of the preliminary report was politically motivated, saying that the attacks led to “complete and total obliteration.”
“But all this leaker stuff, these leakers are professional stabbers,” he said. “They go out and they read this stuff, and then they tell you what it says against the law, but they characterize it for you in a way that’s absolutely false.”
The report prompted further consternation among Trump’s opponents in Washington. Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Coons told ABC News at the NATO summit it is too soon to determine the success of U.S. strikes, adding that the recent round of fighting could have been avoided if Trump had not withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal in his first term.
“The American public needs answers for what what’s really going on,” Shaheen, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said. “If what we see is Iran’s nuclear program has not been obliterated, then we need to try and get Iran back to the negotiating table,” she added.
Shaheen said further nuclear tensions are also possible, as Tehran may “be convinced their race to get a nuclear weapon is even more important — given North Korea’s example — and they will do everything possible to get there as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, Trump said the ceasefire is “going very well” despite Tuesday’s continued exchanges, which prompted him to lambast both Israel and Iran and to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn him off further attacks.
“Israel came back yesterday,” he said. “I was so proud of them, because they came back, you know, they went out because they felt it was a violation. And technically they were right, but it just wouldn’t have worked out very well. And they brought the planes back.”
“They’re not going to be fighting each other,” he added of Israel and Iran. “They’ve had it. They’ve had a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard. You know, they fight like hell. You can’t stop them. Let them fight for about two, three minutes. Then it’s easier to stop them.”
Trump said the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday proved decisive. “That hit ended the war,” he said, likening the U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Japan at the end of World War II.
“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing that ended that war,” Trump said. “If we didn’t take that out, they would have been, they’d be fighting right now,” he continued.
The president expressed optimism about the future of U.S. and Iranian relations.
“I think we’ll end up having somewhat of a relationship with Iran,” he said. “I’ve had a relationship over the last four days. They agreed to the ceasefire, and it was a very equal agreement. They both said, that’s enough. They both said it.”
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Luis Martinez, Anne Flaherty and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — A professional hockey player who was arrested in connection with the 2023 on-ice death of former NHL player Adam Johnson will not face charges, British prosecutors announced on Tuesday.
Johnson, 29, was killed during an October 2023 game between two British professional teams, the Nottingham Panthers and Sheffield Steelers. Johnson, who was playing for the Panthers, suffered a fatal neck injury when he was slashed by a skate during the game.
A Steelers player was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter a month later in the incident. Following a “thorough” police investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service said Tuesday it has decided not to bring criminal charges against the player.
“This was a shocking and deeply upsetting incident,” Michael Quinn, deputy chief crown prosecutor, said in a statement.
“Following a thorough police investigation and a comprehensive review of all the evidence by the CPS, we have concluded that there is not a realistic prospect of conviction for any criminal offence and so there will not be a prosecution,” the statement continued. “Our thoughts remain with the family and friends of Adam Johnson.”
Prosecutors did not identify the hockey player who was arrested in the case.
The Panthers, who play in England’s Elite Ice Hockey League, called Johnson’s death a “freak accident” at the time.
Prosecutors did not identify the hockey player who was arrested in the case.
The Panthers, who play in England’s Elite Ice Hockey League, called Johnson’s death a “freak accident” at the time.
ABC News’ Mark Osborne contributed to this report.
