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Crowds of mourners flocked on Monday to the Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi mosque in Cairo’s Fifth Settlement for an absentee funeral for the perished crew members onboard the EgyptAir MS804 plane that crashed in the Mediterranean Sea.
The hundreds of people attending the event offered their condolences to the relatives of the lost crew members, some wearing the EgyptAir uniform in solidarity with the national airliner and the victims’ families, privately-owned Egypt Independent reported.
“Although staff have been psychologically shaken by the accident, we are trying to carry out our duty to support the airline,” pilot Saher Hassan said.
“We could have been in the shoes of the victims,” another pilot said, adding that the crash has prompted a wave of support and solidarity with those most affected.
In the days since the Airbus 320 went missing en route from Paris to Cairo on Thursday, funerals and memorial services have been held for the victims at various locations.
On Friday, hundreds of people flocked to the Abu Bakr El Seddik Mosque in Cairo to mourn the 66 passengers and crew who died in the disaster.
“I lost my brother, he is married, he has a boy and a girl,” Ayman Ishak Michael Dawood, who lost his older brother Wifqi told the BBC. “He was the backbone of our family, he was loved by everyone.”
There were also emotional scenes in the Boutrossiya Church, located inside the St. Mark Cathedral in the Cairo district of Abbasiya on Sunday, as several hundred mourners attended a memorial service to offer their condolences to the families of the deceased and to pray for the departed.
“The church, the pope, the state and its representatives are very moved by this painful incident and are all standing together in offering their condolences to these families,” Bishop Daniel, who led the service, told the Associated Press.
Flight MS804 vanished at 2:30AM Cairo time on Thursday. The passenger plane was carrying 66 people from Paris to Cairo and ‘vanished’ moments after entering Egyptian airspace. Search and rescue teams consisted of Egyptian and Greek military forces with assistance from French surveillance jets.
Egyptian investigators have asked their French and Greek counterparts to hand over documents and audio and video records on the crashed EgyptAir plane, to determine the causes of disaster.
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