An Indian aviation minister on Sunday said investigators were probing “all angles” behind an Air India crash when asked by media about possible sabotage.
All but one of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner were killed when it crashed in the western city of Ahmedabad on June 12.
Authorities have identified 19 others who died on the ground, but a police source told AFP after the crash that the toll was 38.
India’s minister of state for civil aviation, Murlidhar Mohol, said the investigation was looking at “all angles” when asked specifically about possible “sabotage”, in an interview with Indian news channel NDTV.
“It has never happened before that both engines have shut off together,” Mohol said earlier in the interview, in reference to theories by some experts of possible dual-engine failure.
The minister added that until the investigation report is published, it would be premature to comment on the cause.
The team appointed to investigate the crash started extracting data from the plane’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders this week, in an attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the disaster.
Air India has said that the plane was “well-maintained” and that the pilots were accomplished flyers.
The black boxes of the plane — the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) — were recovered in the days that followed, one from the rooftop of a building at the crash site on June 13, and the other from the debris on June 16, Reuters reported.
