(29 Sep 1997) Natural Sound
Forty-eight victims of Indonesia's worst air disaster were buried on Monday as weeping relatives threw flowers into a mass grave.
The victims and 186 others were killed on Friday when a Garuda Airlines Airbus A-3000 B-4 slammed into the jungle in a thick haze near Medan airport on Sumatra island.
Most of the bodies had been turned over to their families Sunday for private burial after having been identified.
Rows of sombre looking Garuda Airlines employees watched quietly during Monday's mass burial ceremony in the western Indonesian town of Medan.
The half-hour ceremony at the Mamborano Monument was held for 48 un-identified victims.
The cemetery - just outside the fence of Medan's Polonia Airport - already contains 57 victims of a 1979 Garuda commuter plane crash.
Indonesia's Transportation Minister Haryanto Dhanutirto led other officials in placing wreaths on two of the coffins and shovelling dirt onto them as the crowd of hundreds wept at the mass grave.
Workmen then shovelled earth onto the coffins.
As soil dropped onto the caskets marked with symbols for male or female, sobbing relatives pushed near to throw flowers and cry out names.
The wails of distraught relatives grew until they were muffled by the motor of a bulldozer finishing the job.
Investigators continued their search in the mud and jungle growth of the crash site for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders that could explain why the plane crashed on approach to the Sumatra island airport.
President Suharto has asked Haryanto to move the airport and to review all operations connected with flights, pilots and safety.
The haze that blanketed Medan on Friday and Saturday lifted enough on Sunday to allow 300 mourners to fly in and attempt to claim their dead.
The state-run insurance company, P-T Jasa Raharja, said it will pay up to 13-thousand (US) dollars in compensation for each victim.
It is awaiting details from Garuda to confirm the identity of the passengers.
The dead included four Americans, two Britons, four Germans, three French, two Italians on their honeymoon, one Dutch, one Australian and six each from Taiwan and Japan.
The haze that enshrouded the airport - caused by hundreds of forest and brush fires across Indonesia - is one of the possible causes being investigated.
However, an airport official said the plane had been on instrument approach for the main runway.
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