London: British families grieving after the Air India disaster have discovered that the remains of their loved ones have been wrongly identified before repatriation, according to an aviation lawyer representing them.

Relatives of one victim had to abandon funeral plans after being informed that their coffin contained the body of an unknown passenger.

In another case, the “commingled” remains of more than one person killed in the crash were mistakenly placed in the same casket and had to be separated before the interment could go ahead, the Daily Mail reported.

The news came before the start of a two-day state visit to London by India’s prime minister on Wednesday. Narendra Modi will meet his British counterpart, Keir Starmer, to sign a landmark free trade agreement between India and the UK.

The mistakes emerged when the senior coroner for London Inner West, Dr Fiona Wilcox, sought to verify the repatriated Britons’ identities by matching their DNA with samples provided by the families, the Mail reported.

A London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed into a medical college shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad airport on 12 June, killing 241 people onboard, of whom 52 were returning Britons. Another 19 people died on the ground and 67 were seriously injured.

A preliminary report found the plane’s fuel switches had been moved to cut-off, deepening the mystery of what happened and leaving families distressed and seeking answers. The report from India’s aircraft accident investigation bureau, published on 10 July, said both of the plane’s fuel switches moved to the cut-off position immediately after takeoff, stopping fuel supply to the engines.

While some of the dead were cremated or buried in India, the remains of at least 12 victims had been repatriated, said James Healy-Pratt, an aviation lawyer representing many of the British families.

He said he was expecting Starmer to raise these issues with Modi this week at their meeting in London. “The families deserve urgent answers and assurances about the whereabouts of their loved ones,” said Healy-Pratt, who told the Mail he was looking into what had happened during the identification process.

“I’ve been sitting down in the homes of these lovely British families over the last month, and the first thing they want is their loved ones back. But some of them have got the wrong remains and they are clearly distraught over this. It has been going on for a couple of weeks [and] I think these families deserve an explanation.”

He said while the family who received the “commingled” remains had been able to have them separated to hold a funeral service, the second family had been left “in limbo”.