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<\/div>\nOdisha Train Accident: Dozens of people sat outside its gates hoping to find their missing relatives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Bahanaga: <\/b><\/p>\n
At a makeshift morgue in a school, a couple scanned photos of disfigured corpses before leaning in for a closer look at one they think is their 22-year-old son.<\/p>\n
A pendant around his wounded neck provided the terrible confirmation.<\/p>\n
The mother held back tears and leaned gently on her husband’s shoulder for a few seconds, before looking away from the laptop of an official trying to identify the dead after India’s worst train disaster in decades.<\/p>\n
People have come to the Bahanaga High School, less than a kilometre from the crash site near Balasore, in Odisha, since Friday’s horrific three-train collision.<\/p>\n
At least 288 people were killed and hundreds more injured.<\/p>\n
Some train carriages were flipped over, others were torn open with the force of the impact.<\/p>\n
“The dead bodies that came here were already in a very bad state,” said Arvind Agarwal, the official in charge of the makeshift morgue. The searing heat has “further disfigured” many of them, he said.<\/p>\n
“The biggest challenge is the identification,” Mr Agarwal said, sitting in the school headmaster’s office.<\/p>\n
Volunteer Siddharth Jena, 23, sat next to him with a laptop that has numbered pictures of every body recovered and sent to the school since Friday night.<\/p>\n
Corridors lined with corpses<\/p>\n
The stench of rotting flesh hung in the air around the school.<\/p>\n
Dozens of people sat outside its gates hoping to find their missing relatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once a family has identified their relative from photos, they are given a receipt that allows them to view the body. But it has been far from simple.<\/p>\n
“We received 179 bodies here, but only 45 of them could be identified,” said Ranajit Nayak, the police officer in charge of releasing the bodies.<\/p>\n
Bodies in white bags tagged “identified” or “unidentified” lined both sides of the blood-stained corridor late on Saturday, with others stored in classrooms.<\/p>\n
“There were bodies with only a torso, an entirely burnt face, disfigured skull and no other visible identity markers left,” Nayak said.<\/p>\n
“Did you expect that this identification would be easy for anyone?”<\/p>\n
Work began late on Saturday to move unidentified bodies to a centre with better facilities to preserve the bodies for relatives travelling longer distances.<\/p>\n
Unidentified corpses will then be moved to permanent city morgues.<\/p>\n
For some, like Abhijit Chakrabarty, 27, from neighbouring West Bengal, the wait was over. He saw a photograph with a bracelet worn by his missing 25-year-old brother-in-law Subhashish.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But others continued their desperate search. Mr Agarwal, the official at the school, warned that some families might have to take DNA tests to provide matches.<\/p>\n
Noor Jamal Mondon, 38, from Bardhaman district in West Bengal, has heard nothing from his missing brother Yaad Ali, 35.<\/p>\n
“We’ve checked all the hospitals and the crash site throughout the day,” said Mondon, an imam at a mosque. “We are now looking at the dead bodies at the morgue once again.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n