Indonesian police identify first Lion Air crash victim

Indonesian police identify first Lion Air crash victim

JAKARTA - Police have identified the first victim of Monday's Lion Air crash: 24-year-old Jannatun Cintya Dewi, an Indonesian civil servant who was headed to Pangkal Pinang for work.

All 189 passengers aboard Lion Air Flight JT610, which plunged into the Java Sea on Monday morning, are feared dead. But rescuers scouring the ocean have only managed to retrieve body parts, hampering identification efforts.

On Wednesday (Oct 31), Police Brigadier-General Hudi Suryanto told reporters: "We've examined 48 body bags of victim remains and we could identify one victim through primary identification, which is fingerprints and dental records."

Ms Cintya's remains - a partial corpse that had five fingers from the right hand intact - were in one of 24 body bags received on Tuesday at Tanjung Priok.

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"The condition of the remains found were better than most so... the identification is somewhat easier," said Mr Hudi, who heads the police unit that manages the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (Afis).

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The remains, he added, were also tested against and compared to data collected from the victim's family.

Ms Cintya was single and worked for the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.

Police said her remains will be taken home by her family to Sidoadrjo in East Java.

She was on the ill-fated flight with two of her colleagues from the ministry's Directorate General of Oil and Gas. The trio had been sent to Pangkal Pinang to monitor the implementation of the B20 programme, which makes it mandatory for vehicles to use biodiesel that consists of 20 per cent biodiesel and 80 per cent petroleum diesel.

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Ms Cintya's brother, Mr Nadzir Ahmad Firdaus, had told local media earlier in the day that his family was still clinging to the hope that she had survived.

But, said the 17-year-old: “If it is predestined that she returns to God, our family will accept it.”

This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.

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