THE bodies of 14 victims of last month's Aeroflot air crash, including some of the six Hong Kong victims, are so badly disfigured they cannot be identified.
The bodies will be cremated together and grieving relatives will receive a one-fourteenth share of the ashes.
According to reports from the crash site in Siberia, investigators were unable to follow one method of identifying the corpses - from their wrist-watches - because the bodies had been looted.
The Aeroflot jet flying under the banner of Russian International Airlines was on a regular flight from Moscow to Hong Kong last month when it crashed, killing all 75 people on board.
Analysis of the plane's black box sound recorders, which survived the crash intact, apparently show that the pilot, Yaroslav Kudrinsky, in an astounding lapse of professional judgment, let his teenage son Eldar take control of the plane while he himself left the cockpit to talk to the passengers.
The son is thought to have inadvertently disengaged the automatic pilot and pitched the plane into its 10,000-metre death plunge.