MADRID - The first funerals for the victims of the Madrid air crash were held Friday as experts said a series of faults likely caused the Spanair jet to slam into the ground just after takeoff, killing 153 people.
Hundreds of people attended the funeral of Amalia Filloy and her 14-year-old daughter, also named Amalia, in the eastern town of La Fregeneda.
Her husband and 11-year-old daughter are one of the 19 survivors of Wednesday's crash, Spain's worst aviation accident in 25 years.
Amalia made headlines in Spain after a firefighter who was one of the first to arrive at the crash scene told reporters that she begged him to save her daughter first as she lay dying.
A funeral was also held in Spain's Canary Islands, the destination of the doomed Spanair flight, for a 27-year-old soldier and at a monastery near the northern town of Pamplona for a 61-year-old man.
Spanish authorities announced that a national memorial service for the victims would be held on September 1 in Madrid's Almudena Cathedral, where Spain's Crown Prince Felipe married his wife Letizia in 2004.
Video images held by the civil aviation authority, AENA, showed that the US-made MD-82 twin-engine jet took off and crashed moments later near the runway on Wednesday, the newspapers ABC and El Pais reported.
"The video shows that the plane caught fire only after it hit the ground," El Pais said.
Witnesses had been quoted as saying the left engine caught fire as the plane took off, but authorities have never confirmed this.
Health authorities Friday said the condition of three of the injured was "very serious", one was "serious" and four were "serious but stable".
Most of the dead were burned beyond recognition and the grim task of identifying the bodies continued at a makeshift morgue at a Madrid congress centre.
Authorities said 51 bodies had so far been identified using fingerprints, but DNA tests will be necessary to identify the most badly burned bodies.
A long inquiry is now expected into the crash.
The head of the investigation team, Emilio Valerio, said the results would be known in about a month.
?Spanair , Spain's second largest airline, reported on Thursday that an air intake valve was repaired just before take-off, but experts quoted by newspapers said that fault was not to blame for the accident.
"The fault fixed by Spanair's maintenance technicians could not have had an influence on the crash," Jose Maria Delgado, head of Spain's Association of Aeronautic Maintenance Technicians, told El Pais.
Experts said a chain of technical faults was probably responsible.
"There was more than one cause. An engine was not the cause of the accident," El Pais quoted AENA chief Manuel Battista as saying.
A representative of the airline pilots' association, Felipe Laorden, noted that failure of one engine could not on its own have caused the crash, as "the plane is prepared for that eventuality."
The newspaper El Mundo, quoting AENA sources, said the engine may have exploded and bits of it flew off and damaged the tail of the plane.
ABC newspaper, also quoting AENA sources, said the aircraft did not have enough thrust at take-off.
Spanair managing director Marcus Hedblom defended the company on Thursday, saying that "everything we did with the aircraft was by the rules."
Investigators have begun examining the two black box flight recorders.
Representatives of the Boeing company, which took over McDonnell Douglas in 1997, are helping with the investigation.
There were 162 passengers -- including two babies and 20 other children -- on the jet plus 10 crew, four of whom were travelling as passengers.
The government said most of the passengers were Spanish, but there were citizens of at least 11 other countries on board, including five Germans and two French.
The head of Spain's commercial pilots association rejected newspaper allegations that Spanair's financial crisis may have been to blame.
"To blame the accident on the situation at the company is an outrage," Jose Maria Vazquez wrote in an article for El Pais.
Spanair, owned by Scandinavian carrier SAS, recently proposed shedding almost a quarter of its 4,000 staff because of fuel price rises and reduced demand. Its pilots had threatened a strike over conditions.
The accident was Spain's worst plane disaster since a Boeing 747 belonging to Colombian airline Avianca crashed in Madrid in 1983 killing 180 and the deadliest in Europe since a Russian Tupolev crashed in Ukraine in 2006 killing 170.
