Husband identifies critically injured passenger
Police using dental records and DNA to ascertain identities of nine bodies in the mortuary
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The woman in her 50s who was seriously injured in Saturday’s coach crash and is currently in a coma and in critical condition has now been identified.
Det. Superintendent Göran Wennqvist from the National Bureau of Investigation confirms that the woman was identified on Monday evening by her husband, who was himself injured and hospitalised as a result of the accident.
The woman is in a stable condition, but is by no means out of danger, according to Guillermo Quesada, the senior physician at the intensive care unit where she is being treated.
The failure to identify the comatose woman before now was to some extent understandable.
A good many of the dead and injured were related, but relatives were not always taken to the same hospitals (four hospitals in the Málaga area took the injured immediately after the accident), and in many cases it was some time before patients were in a position to speak and express themselves.
Although relatives have been informed of the loss of their loved ones, the NBI is continuing the process of formally identifying the nine victims of the accident.
Dental records of all the persons named as deceased by the Spanish authorities have been gathered and sent to Spain. DNA testing has also been started.
The police believe they will thus be able to determine the individual identities of the nine bodies in the morgue.
According to Wennqvist, the grave injuries suffered by the victims are rendering this a slow task.
The nine dead, eight of whom expired at the scene of the accident, were in many cases the victims of the broken central reservation steel barrier when the bus turned on its side.
In its Tuesday edition, the Swedish-language daily Hufvudstadsbladet reported that the Finnish police suspected their Spanish colleagues might have mixed up the identity of two of those killed in the crash.
Wennqvist corrected this misconception, saying that it was a question of the list of injured persons sent from Spain on Sunday.
This list also contained a guess at the identity of the woman still in a coma. The Finnish police had already discounted this suggestion as a false lead.
There are currently still 13 Finnish casualties in hospital care in Spain.
The police are not releasing the names of the dead or injured to the public.
However, the authorities have stated that two of the dead were from Helsinki, two from nearby Tuusula, and one each from Espoo, Kajaani, Pori, Kangasala, and Tampere.
More on this subject:
 Twelve injured coach crash passengers brought home from Spain last night
Helsingin Sanomat
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