BAHANAGA: At a makeshift mortuary in an Indian school, a couple scanned photos of mutilated corpses before leaning in for a closer look at one they thought was their 22-year-old son.
A pendant around his badly wounded neck provided terrible confirmation.
The mother held back tears and rested on her husband’s shoulder for a few seconds before looking away from the laptop of an official attempting to identify the dead after India’s worst train disaster in decades.
Since Friday’s horrific three-train collision, people have come to the Bahanaga High School, less than a kilometre from the crash scene near Balasore, in the eastern state of Odisha.
At least 288 people were killed, and hundreds more injured.
Some train carriages were flipped over while others were torn open with the force of the impact.
Arvind Agarwal, the officer in charge of the temporary mortuary, stated that the deceased corpses that arrived here were already in terrible shape. Many of them, he said, had been “further disfigured” by the intense heat.
Agarwal stated, who seated in the office of the school’s headmaster, “The identification is the biggest challenge.”
Siddharth Jena, a volunteer who is 23 years old, sat next to him and had a laptop with images of each person that had been found and submitted to the school since Friday night.
Corridors lined with corpses
Around the school, the smell of putrefying flesh permeated the air. Dozens of people waited outside the gates in search of missing family members. A ticket allowing a family to examine the body is provided to them once they have successfully recognised their relative from images. But it hasn’t exactly been easy.
Ranajit Nayak, the police officer in charge of releasing the bodies, said they received 179 bodies but only 45 of them could be identified
Bodies in white bags tagged “identified” or “unidentified” lined both sides of the blood-stained school corridor late on Saturday, with others stored in classrooms.
Nayak said there were bodies with only a torso, an entirely burnt face, disfigured skull and no other visible identity markers left and asked, “This identification would be easy for anyone?”
Work began late on Saturday to move unidentified bodies to a centre with better facilities to preserve them as relatives travelled longer distances for identification.
Unidentified bodies will then be moved to permanent city morgues.
The wait was over for some, like Abhijit Chakrabarty, 27, from neighbouring West Bengal state, who saw a photograph with a bracelet worn by his missing 25-year-old brother-in-law Subhashish.
But others continued their desperate search. Agarwal, the official at the school, said that some families might have to undergo DNA tests to identify corpses.
