"I would prefer my son's remains over any amount of money"

"On May 26, 2003, I was listening to the radio as I got ready to go out. I heard the announcer say that a plane carrying Spanish soldiers had crashed," says Granada Ripollés, the sister of Major José Manuel Ripollés. "I suddenly knew that this was the plane my brother was aboard. I told my mother that we needed to prepare for the worst." At that point, "the worst" was having lost José Manuel. But over the coming months and years, worse was to come.

It has been 10 years since Spain's worst military air crash killed 62 members of the armed forces. There has been little closure for their families. "Nobody has apologized for what happened," says Paco Cardona, father of Sergeant Francisco Cardona. "In a final act of arrogance, they have pardoned the two majors who were found guilty by a court of handing over the remains of somebody who was not my son. The senior figure in all this, the then-Defense Minister Federico Trillo, is now ambassador to London. He is not even a professional diplomat. And no, we have not been compensated by the companies involved, but the truth is that I would prefer my son's remains over any amount of money.

"I didn't bury my son, I buried somebody else's. I cried for 23 months, every Sunday, at the cemetery, and then I found out that it wasn't him, and that my son had been cremated by another family, who believed that he was their son," Cardona adds.

Still grieving for the loss of their loved ones, the families then had to come to terms with the doubt that they had not in fact buried their son, husband or brother. Cardona says that when he and others brought the matter up with military high command and the government, they were insulted. "Trillo's number three told me that my son would be ashamed of my behavior."

I cried at the cemetery for 23 months, then found out it wasn't him"

In the best-case scenario, the team Trillo sent to Turkey to repatriate the bodies - which did not include a single pathologist - spent three hours and 25 minutes identifying 30 charred corpses. Less than seven minutes per corpse. Neither did the team take DNA samples. The Turkish authorities insisted that the Defense Ministry team sign a document saying they were taking the bodies back to Spain without having identified them. The remains of two people were put in one coffin. Each one of the 30 was falsely identified. "They were passing round remains as though they were letters. They persuaded us not to open the coffins. I am so sorry that I did not insist," says Cardona.

It took the families almost two years before the remains of their loved ones were returned to them. It then took another four years before the hearing into the Defense Ministry's handling of the disaster. Not a single politician was called to testify, and much less held to account by the judge overseeing the investigation. On May 19, 2009, that judge, Javier Gómez Bermúdez, sentenced General Navarro, the man who Trillo had tasked with repatriating the bodies, to three years in jail. He would die in June 2010. Majors José Ramón Ramírez and Miguel Ángel Sáez were sentenced to 18 months in prison for complicity in falsely identifying the bodies. They never spent any time in prison either: they were amnestied by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in April 2012, and have never apologized to the families they deceived.

"They got away with it, but the government showed its true colors by pardoning them virtually in secret, and allowing them to go on shaming the armed forces by continuing to wear a uniform," says Miguel Ángel Sencianes, the brother of Sergeant José Manuel Sencianes. "The royal ordinances state that a member of the armed forces cannot lie, and they lied; they also state that every effort will be made to recover the bodies of fallen comrades, but they did so in the worst possible way," he adds.

But Ripollés says that burying somebody else's dead was not the worst of the disaster. "The worst thing about all this is the way the plane was chartered. This tragedy could have been avoided - the government should never have allowed its service personnel to fly in such conditions, in a Soviet-era aircraft that had been chartered via five subcontractors in five different countries."

They told me that my son would be ashamed of my behavior"

Many of the dead servicemen came from military families. Major Ripollés' father and grandfather served in the armed forces, as did the father of Ignacio González Arribas, General José Luis González Arribas, who died three years after the accident knowing that the military high command had lied to him, and that Defense Minister Trillo had only agreed to meet him "to try to convince him, via veiled threats, that he should not start a victims' association," says his son Pacho González. Sergeant Cardona's brother was also a member of the armed forces. "He left after the accident, he felt betrayed," says his father.

The families of those serving in the armed forces know that members of the military will always do as a politician tells them. "That's what has been most frustrating: after all that has happened, not one of them assumed their responsibility," says Pacho González. In the same way, they know that soldiers do not always come back alive. "If he had died during a mission, doing something useful, serving his country, we would have cried for him. We were ready for that, we were prepared to deal with that, but not for him dying in this useless and avoidable way," he adds.

The lingering doubt in the minds of so many families is that they could have done something to prevent the accident. Many say their sons and brothers told them of their concerns about the poor quality of the aircraft used to transport military personnel. Many of them were more fearful of those planes than being in Afghanistan. "My brother told me one day that until a plane crashed, or nearly crashed, they would keep on using these companies. And that is what happened. When I was waiting for them to arrive in Zaragoza, and saw on the television that an aircraft from a former Soviet republic had crashed with Spanish military personnel aboard, I knew that this was what my brother had talked about," says Sencianes. Major Ripollés called them "pirate planes." Paco Cardona's term is "flying coffins."

Many of the families of the victims say they are often asked why they keep on fighting, 10 years after the event. "We cannot let this go. They have not left us yet. They are still aboard that plane because nobody has accepted their responsibility," says Sencianes.

Asked if the passing of a decade has changed them, Granada Ripollés says: "They have made us insensitive. We now talk about the ins and outs of forensics as though it were the most natural thing in the world. It is terrible."

But Sencianes insists the experience has made him and others who lost family members stronger. "I think we are better people as a result of this: we have done something noble, we have fought for our loved ones and for their comrades. Nobody will ever fly in a plane like that again."

Their only hope now resides in their appeal to Strasbourg. "I don't know what my life will be like after this," says Ripollés. "I will have to learn to live again, without that damn plane, because the last 10 years of my life and work have been that Yak-42."