As he piloted an Air India Express flight from Dubai into Mangalore on May 22 last year, Captain Zlatko Glusica carried in his bags a golden Seiko watch — gifted to him by his two children on his 55th birthday.
Merima, 31, and younger brother Alexander never found out whether Glusica liked the watch. It is just one of the many questions that continue to haunt the family one year after the crash of that flight, for which the blame has been put by many quarters on the foreign commander of the flight — the Serbian Glusica.
In their last exchange, on May 18, 2010, over Skype — just after Glusica had reached Mangalore to join duty from home town Belgrade — Merima asked him about the gift. He told her he was yet to unpack his bags.
Four days later, Alexander, then preparing for a qualifying test for his pilot’s licence, called up Merima to tell her about the crash. “In disbelief, I rang my father’s mobile phone, which was ringing endlessly and he was not answering it...,” he said in an e-mail to the newspaper, the first time the family is talking to the Indian media.
What has prompted Merima and Alexander — the eldest of three children from Glusica’s first marriage — to break their silence is what followed their father’s death.
Six months after the crash, the Serbian media was awash with selective reports from India based on the findings of a panel that probed the incident. These blamed Glusica, led off by headlines such as “sleepy pilot” and “pilot nodded off”.
“I bought all the newspapers in which it was written that my father killed 158 people in a plane crash,” Merima says. “Has anyone thought about how the family and children will feel the moment they read that their father, husband, brother is marked as a killer?”
There were diplomatic protests over how findings of the report, which hadn’t been finalised, reached the media.
Questioning the way Glusica was being blamed, the family says: “The captain is the commander of the airplane, but is he the only one conducting the flight?”
09/03/11 Smita Aggarwal/Indian Express
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