Windhoek
Family of the Namibian late paramedic Alfred John Ward can finally come to closure as his remains were repatriated from Cape Town late on Wednesday. He will be buried in Swakopmund tomorrow.
The 24-year-old Ward was among the five people killed in an air ambulance crash while on a mercy flight of E-Med Rescue24.
The plane went down at Maastricht wine farm in Cape Town on August 16. Family members, co-workers and emergency rescue personnel gathered at the Martin Luther Memorial at Swakopmund to accompany the hearse carrying his remains through the town, and then on to the AGS Church before taking it to the local morgue.
The Ward family had waited patiently since the accident, as they could not plan his funeral without his death certificate.
Terrence Ward, the father of the deceased, yesterday told New Era that his son would be buried tomorrow at the AGS Church in Tamariskia.
“Emergency services are planning to bury him with full honours, giving him a motorcade and a guard of honour. To have my son buried like that, that is such a great honour,” Ward said.
Ward, Gabriel le Roux, 80, his daughter Charmaine Koortzen, 49, and pilots Steven Naude, 53, and Amore Espag, 23, were killed in the crash.
The plane was en route from Oranjemund to Cape Town. It was transporting Le Roux, who had sustained a head injury in a fall, to a Cape Town hospital. The plane was instructed to fly in a holding pattern due to an apparently radar problem at Cape Town International Airport.
Air Traffic and Navigation Services said there had been a “minor technical glitch,” which affected both the departures and arrivals.