'These are the most terrible days of my life'

NATALYA ZABOTNAYA takes a huge breath of fresh air as she emerges from a morgue in western Ukraine, where the body supposed to be her son's turned out to be another "poor man".

Her daughter and her boyfriend support the middle-aged woman, her eyes red and her face puffy, as she walks away from the morgue where the stench of burnt flesh hangs around a huge refrigerator as officials sift through body parts.

A queue of people, weeping or stunned into silence, await their turn to identify the bodies of dozens killed when a fighter jet crashed into spectators at an air show in the western city of Lviv on Saturday.

At least 83 died in the world’s worst air show disaster, but only 60 corpses have been registered at the morgue, and the search for missing relatives was becoming increasingly tricky.

“He went to work yesterday. He works near the airfield... We saw his documents but it was not his body. It was the body of someone else, some poor, poor man,” Ms Zabotnaya said, her voice shaking with grief as she talks about her 25-year-old son.

“It was terrible. We don’t know anything. Where is he? What has happened to him? He is probably already in pieces.”

Local officials said it was hard to identify some of the bodies, many ripped apart by metal shards from the plane which were flung across the Sknyliv military airfield, on the outskirts of this picturesque, historic city.

Others were badly burnt when the Sukhoi Su-27 fighter plane clipped the ground and cartwheeled into a crowd, exploding into a fireball.

“Some of the bodies are so damaged that the final death toll could change by one body either way, but no more than that,” said Evhem Marchuk, secretary of Ukraine’s defence and security council and head of the state commission into the accident.

“The people were lightly dressed and without documents so identification is now a very big problem for investigators and doctors,” he told a news conference.

A handwritten list of names was stuck on the gate at the morgue and updated as relatives filed in one by one.

One middle-aged man said he still hoped to find his colleague alive after the morgue mixed up his documents.

For others, trips to hospitals were taking their toll. “Yesterday my daughter and son-in-law went to the air show and since then I haven’t heard anything about or from them,” said Lyudmila, 65, declining to give her surname.

“These days have been the most terrible days of my life,” she sobbed, wrapping her arms around her black-clad figure as she explained that this was the third hospital she had visited.

Andrei Patrik, 30, waited in the hospital’s corridor for news of his father who suffered burns at the air show. “I am waiting for my father. He is still unconscious,” Patrik, pale and weary after a sleepless night, said. “It’s just very sad.”