A funeral ceremony of the nine fallen soldiers aboard a coast guard aircraft that crashed off the coast of northern Vietnam earlier this month was organized in Hanoi on Thursday morning.

According to the Ministry of National Defense, a memorial service for the CASA-212 aircraft flight crew was scheduled to take place from 7:00 am to 10:00 am at the ministry’s funeral home on Tran Thanh Tong Street in the Vietnamese capital.

Funeral rituals took place from 10 to 11 o’clock in the morning, followed by a cremation carried out at the city’s crematorium in Thanh Tri District.

The ceremony was attended by Vietnamese Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong, State President Tran Dai Quang, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and Chairwoman of the National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, among other high-ranking officials.

The nine deceased members of the flight crew included Colonel Le Kim Toan, Colonel Nguyen Duc Hao, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van Chinh, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Chu, Major Le Van Dinh, Lieutenant Do Van Manh, Senior Lieutenant Nguyen Van Thai, Senior Lieutenant Nguyen Ba The, and Senior Lieutenant Le Duc Lam.

The Spanish-made CASA-212 aircraft was captained by Col. Toan and carried nine members of a search crew when it crashed into the ocean on the afternoon of June 16, 44 nautical miles southwest of Bach Long Vi Island off Hai Phong City.

The coast guard aircraft had taken off from the Gia Lam military airport in Hanoi earlier the same day to carry out a search and rescue mission for the then-missing pilot of a crashed Russian-made Su30-MK2 fighter jet  whose body was found on June 17, 33 nautical miles from Hon Me Islet off the north-central province of Thanh Hoa.

The Vietnamese fighter jet disappeared from radar screens on June 14 during a training session over the sea, with one pilot confirmed dead and the other brought to safety.

The first four bodies from the CASA flight crew were found on June 23 and 24. The next two were discovered on Monday, along with the aircraft's black box, about 26 nautical miles southeast of Bach Long Vi.

Two more bodies were retrieved on Tuesday by search and rescue units operating close to where the plane went down.

Despite the rain

Many Vietnamese citizens, despite not having met the late soldiers, queued in the morning rain hours before the ceremony, several of whom traveled hundreds of kilometers from other provinces, to honor the fallen soldiers.

According to Tran Thi Nhan, an acquaintance of Sen. Lt. Thai from his hometown in Quynh Giang Commune, located in the north-central province of Nghe An, the loss of the soldier was bad news for the entire locality.

“We traveled a long way to say farewell to a son, a grandson, and younger brother of the people in Quynh Giang,” Nhan said.

Hoai Thu Huong, a 72-year-old woman from Hanoi, stated that she caught a bus to the funeral home at 6:00 am, adding that the venue was already packed with mourners.

“I will wait until the end of the ceremony to pay my tributes to the lost soldiers,” Huong said.

Inside the hall, family members and comrades of the fallen heroes could not hold back their tears as music was played to commemorate the deceased.

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