BALASORE, India — Indian authorities made fervent appeals to families on Tuesday to help identify 83 unclaimed bodies kept in hospitals and mortuaries after the death toll in the country’s deadliest rail crash in over two decades rose to 288.
The disaster struck on Friday, when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the tracks and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near the district of Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha.
Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, health director of Odisha, told Reuters that authorities were trying to source iced containers to help preserve the unclaimed bodies.
“Unless they are identified, a post mortem cannot be done,” Mohapatra said, explaining that under Odisha state regulations no autopsy can be conducted on an unclaimed body until 96 hours have passed.
The state government revised the death toll upward to 288, from 275 earlier, and said that 205 dead bodies have been identified and handed over. The remaining 83 will be preserved, Odisha Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena said.
June 4, 202301:19
At state capital Bhubaneswar’s biggest hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, large television screens displayed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are scouring hospitals and mortuaries for friends and relatives.
A detailed list was made of distinguishing features for each body, but relatives could first view photographs, however gruesome, to identify missing loved ones, a senior police official told Reuters.
The trains had passengers from several states and officials from seven states were in Balasore to help people claim the bodies and take the dead home, the police official added.
However, all the help proved inadequate for some families.
Niranjan Patra was shocked when authorities informed him that the body of his aunt, Manju Mani Patra, who had traveled on the Coromandel Express, seemed to have been handed over to someone else.
Patra said his family identified her through the photographs of the deceased released by the government, but they were unable to find her body in any of the hospitals in Bhubaneswar.
“We don’t want the compensation, we want to perform her last rites. No one is able to tell us where her body is,” Patra said, standing at the help desk at Balasore railway station.
A forlorn Parbati Hembrum, from West Bengal’s Hooghly district, also stood near the help desk, looking for information on her son Gopal.
The 20-year-old had traveled in the Coromandel Express with three others from their village, but while the other three returned home, Gopal has not.
Tarapada Tudu, standing next to his relative Hembrum, said Gopal was admitted to Balasore hospital after the accident but when they looked for him there, the hospital said he was released the same day after being treated for minor injuries.
But, filled with dread over the lack of contact with Gopal, Tudu said he and Hembrum will travel to Bhubaneswar to look for him among the dead.
There were also incidents of double claims for dead bodies.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
