Girl's body used as TV prop

Press, 14 September 1976, Page 17

Girl's body used as TV prop

j(ZPA London Television cameramen and photographers at the scene cf the world’s worst mid-air disaster used the body of a girl victim as a prop, according to a newspaper report confirmed by British Airways. In a report headed "Anger over air crash ghouls,” the -Sunday Mirror” said that onlookers were “horrified” as her body was dragged from the wreckage of the British Airways Trident and into a cornfield near Zagreb. Jugoslavia. “The outrage began with a suitable young body being eelected for the cameras,” said the paper. “Then the girl was pulled from the frac-

tured fuselage and dumped on the ground. “To give the scene a more horrendous touch, the cameramen cut off her jeans, exposing the lower part of her body. She was left covered modestly in death by a pair of blue knickers. One man then pressed a numbered disc against her thigh to identify photographs. “When the men finished, the dead girl was put into a plastic bag and dumped into a hearse.”

The report said that those responsible were “foreigners, not British.”

“Some British photographers who saw the event later protested to British Airways.”

A British Airways spokesman said: “We are shocked by this despicable act.”