Families of the seven South Africans killed in a plane crash in Cameroon last week will be compensated, Kenya Airways said on Monday.
It was obliged to compensate them under the Warsaw Convention, said the airline’s Southern African marketing manager Glenn Lewington, dismissing reports that this would not be the case.
A copy of the Convention, which governs carriers’ liability for death or personal injury and loss or damage to baggage, was issued to all passengers with their tickets, he said.
It imposed no financial limits for death or bodily injury on Kenya Airways flights, but did limit the extent of claims in respect of baggage.
While the compensation process had not started yet, Lewington emphasised that it was ”not an issue that’s being ignored”.
It would be dealt with ”shortly” from the airline’s head office in Nairobi.
”… At this stage, the families are more interested in getting closure; in seeing their relatives’ [remains]; in seeing and the crash site,” he said.
Kenya Airways flight KQ507 crashed in a thickly forested, tidal mangrove swamp during a storm soon after taking off from Douala, in Cameroon, for Nairobi last weekend, killing all 114 on board, among them seven South Africans.
In a statement on Sunday, Kenya Airways said it was still waiting for the relevant Cameroonian governor to give written permission for access to the mortuary, incident site and hangar, where property from the site was being housed.
However, his office had advised that the site had been sprayed with disinfectant and was now safe, and that groups of no more than five people at a time would be taken to the site from Monday.
Kenya Airways said it would provide them with protective clothing and boots and had shown them a video of the site to prepare them.
Describing the process of identifying the remains as ”intricate”, the airline said this was likely to take ”a considerable length of time”.
Lewington accompanied a group of the South Africans’ relatives to Cameroon on Friday. He said 11 relatives had been to Cameroon so far.
He took with him identikits and identity documents of five of the South Africans. The families had with them DNA ”in the form of clothing or pillows”, he said.
Those in Cameroon over the weekend were unable to go to the crash site because of torrential rain on Saturday and Sunday, he said.
The remains of the dead had already been removed from the crash site to the mortuary in Douala.
None had been positively identified yet and none would be repatriated until identification was made.
A team of six pathologists left Johannesburg on Saturday to help with the identification process, said Foreign Affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa. — Sapa