In a story reminiscent of fiction, a 70-year-old Indian man reunited with his family, who thought he had been killed in a plane crash in India in 1976. According to the Mirror, Sajid Thungal met his shocked wife and family after 45 years of disappearance, having left his hometown Shasthamkotta in India in October 1976 to support his family by working in the Gulf.
The disaster struck when one of the engines of his Indian Airlines flight from Bombay to Madras caught fire, resulting in the deaths of 95 people on board. Sajid's parents, four sisters, and three brothers assumed he was among the deceased, but in reality, he traveled to Abu Dhabi, where he secured a job promoting Indian culture abroad and organizing Malayalam film shows.
Sajid returned to India in 1982 and moved to Mumbai to start a business. After relying on multiple jobs to sustain himself and his venture, he feared seeing his family, worried they would view him as a failure. He wanted to wait until he was successful before reaching out to them. He stated, “Well, if people hadn’t taken care of me, I would have died without meeting my family again.”
In 2019, Sajid met Pastor K.M. Philip, who runs the Social and Evangelical Association of Love to reunite families with their loved ones. After learning about the family's prolonged separation, Philip sent a social worker to Sajid’s family's home to find them. Sajid's father passed away in 2012, but his mother Fatima Bibi, aged 95, his wife Jamila, and his brothers Aziz, Mohammad, and Kanju are all still alive and well. They were astonished to discover that their long-lost son had been living in Dubai.
Philip noted, “When I met Sajid, he was mentally distressed, and it took a long time to uncover his family.” Mohammad is set to travel to Mumbai on Wednesday to see his brother for the first time in nearly five decades. He mentioned, “I had gone to various countries in search of my brother,” adding, “I traveled to the United Arab Emirates to find out where my brother was.” The family plans to turn the return home into a festival and will not let him out of their sight once he is safely home.
