A couple of impassive Indians, in a high school serving as a morgue, watch photos of disfigured corpses scroll by when suddenly, they think they recognize their 22-year-old son.
The pendant, which the deceased wears around their bruised neck, confirms the death of their child.
The mother swallows her tears, sways gently on her husband’s shoulder, then looks away from the screen of the laptop an Indian official hands over to families in an attempt to identify relatives who lost their lives in the India’s worst train disaster in decades.
The collision between three trains, which occurred on Friday evening, left at least 288 dead and 900 injured, near Balasore, about 200 kilometers from Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Odisha, in eastern India.
Throughout the day and late into the night from Saturday to Sunday, a distraught population flocked to the premises of the Bahanaga high school, transformed into a morgue, less than a kilometer from the site of the collision.
“The corpses brought here were already in very poor condition,” Arvind Agarwal, head of this makeshift morgue, told AFP, but after more than twenty-four hours of scorching heat, “they are, for the most part, , unrecognizable”.
“So the biggest test (for the families) is the identification of the bodies,” he adds, sitting in the school principal’s office.
At his side, Siddharth Jena, a 23-year-old volunteer, holds a laptop computer containing the register of numbered photos of the corpses sent to this high school since Friday evening.
Exhalations of decomposing flesh invaded the school and its surroundings. Dozens of people seated at the gates of the establishment await information about their missing relatives.
Once a body has been identified among the photos in the register, the family inherits a receipt which authorizes them to visit the deceased.
But things are far from simple.
“We have 179 bodies here, and only 45 could be identified,” Ranajit Nayak, deputy director of railway police, told AFP on Saturday.
A dozen corpses in white body bags, lying in classrooms and in the bloodstained hallway, were marked “identified” or “unidentified.”
“Today, we have bodies here of which only a torso remains, whose faces are completely charred, their heads disfigured, with no more visible distinctive signs of identity”, he added.
Later that evening, the unidentified bodies were transferred to another site, to more appropriate facilities for the preservation of the bodies, while waiting for relatives to arrive from distant areas.
For some, like Abhijit Chakrabarty, 27, from the neighboring state of West Bengal, the wait will not have lasted too long. He quickly tracked down Subhashish, his 25-year-old brother-in-law, by recognizing a bracelet on his wrist in a photo.
But for others, the ordeal continues. Mr Agarwal has already warned the families that they will probably have to undergo DNA tests to help identify the corpses.
Noor Jamal Mondon from Bardhaman district, West Bengal has no news of his younger brother, 35-year-old Yaad Ali.
“We searched all the hospitals and the accident site all day,” Mondon, a 38-year-old imam, told AFP, “so we are once again going back to see the bodies in the morgue.”
04/06/2023 14:53:11 – Bahanaga (Inde) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
