Ethiopian Crash Probe: Bereaved families say Boeing apology not enough to heal wounds
Updated 22:10, 09-Apr-2019
[]
03:22
Boeing's apology is doing little to ease the grief of the victims' families - who says words won't heal their scars. Our reporter, Daniel Arapmoi, visited the family of one passenger killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Juliet Murundu Otieno, a 50-year-old mother of three from Eldoret in Kenya's rift valley region was among the 157 people who died on March 10, when a Boeing 737 MAX 8 nose-dived and crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa.
This is the first time Juliet's mother Sellah Indimuli is going through the funeral program of her late daughter who died in the crash.
She says she kept the funeral program to herself over fears of breaking down.
She runs us through some of the latest and final pictures of her daughter on her smartphone sent to her from Egypt where Murundu had travelled before her death.
Flipping through the pages of her daughter's Eulogy, Indimuli says Juliet was her favorite, joyful and inspiration to have.
"We are all sad, we are very sad in the family, we have lost a very nice number two."
Standing by a grave site at the back yard of his family house in central Kenyan town of Nakuru, Quindos Karanja Junior looks at the pictures of five family members who died in Ethiopian Airlines plane crash last month.
Boeing the manufacturer has acknowledged bad data feeding into an automated flight system on the company's popular MAX 737 jets played a role in the crash with an apology to the Victim's families.
But bereaved families say apology from Boeing, the manufacturers of the ill-fated jet is simply not enough to bring back their loved ones.
QUINDOS KARANJA JR. BEREAVED FAMILY MEMBER "It is good that Dennis Muilenburg came up, the CEO of Boeing came up and owned it up. But all we want is, before these planes go back to the skies, they make sure that everything has been taken care off, that we don't have such a tragedy because it is a pain, it's very painful."
SELLAH INDIMULI BEREAVED FAMILY MEMBER "They are doing their part, they are doing their jobs but they are not inside us. You may talk because it is your job to talk, but you don't know the one you are talking to how he or she is feeling, if they did their part and it satisfied them, well and good but for us we have lost and shall never gain."
DANIEL ARAPMOI ELDORET, KENYA "Sellah Indimuli is still trying to come to terms with the death of her daughter, she still can't believe that her daughter is gone, and gone forever."
The March 10 disaster, and parallels with another 737 MAX crash in Indonesia last October in which 189 people died, has led to the worldwide grounding of Boeing's flagship model.
Daniel Arapmoi, CGTN Eldoret, Kenya.