SEOL Ik-Soo has been hailed as the hero of the Air China
disaster after rescuing passengers from the burning wreckage and
treating others on the mountainside before he collapsed.
The 27-year-old South Korean was on the Beijing-Busan flight
that crashed into Shineo mount on Monday killing at least 120
people.
Seol, a travel agency trainee, said he was in the middle of the
Boeing 767-200 as it prepared to land, when he saw a blue flash
from the window and then lost consciousness.
After waking up, he pulled himself out of a crack in the
wreckage that he said was like a ”crushed Coke can” and started
looking for a companion, college teacher, Lee Kang-Dae, among the
bodies and survivors screaming for help.
Seol told journalists how he returned into the smouldering
debris, thick with stench of burning flesh, found the teacher and
carried him back out on his back.
Bleeding from a cut under his left eye, Seol and others went
through the wreckage, pulling out some survivors and helping others
by covering their wounds with strips torn from their clothes.
For two hours in pouring rain, he carried or helped some 20
survivors down the steep slope of the mountain which the jet
slammed into as it tried to land at Gimhae airport in the southern
city of Busan.
”I had no other thoughts but to rescue as many people as
possible before I lost consciousness,” Seol told journalists.
”I don’t know where the energy came from but I felt as if I was
carrying stuff as light as a sheet of newspaper,” he said.
About 10 high school boys, who helped carry injured survivors
down the hillside, were also praised alongside the hundreds of
rescuers and volunteers who worked through the night in pouring
rain.
According to the latest official toll, 119 people were killed,
nine were missing and 38 people, including the pilot, were in
hospital, many in critical condition.
Meanwhile, Chinese and South Korean investigators on Tuesday travelled to
the mountainous crash site and ordered the area to be cordoned off as rescuers picked
through charred wreckage with pickaxes, hoes and their bare hands
in a bid to find eight missing people.
Body parts scattered in the mud amid the debris of blood stained
clothes, shoes and luggage were placed in two wooden coffins.
Soaked by more heavy rain and thick fog, some 2 500 military and
civilian rescuers have been mobilised to search the thick
vegetation on Shineo mountain, amid dwindling hopes of finding the
missing alive. – Sapa-AFP