Final rites: ‘Mothers can’t even recognise their children’

Relatives struggle to identify their loved ones killed in the Hub accident.

KARACHI:

“Mothers cannot even recognise their children,” says Riasat Ali, a clerk at the Edhi Morgue in Sohrab Goth, Karachi. “Today’s incident reminds me of the 2012 Baldia Town factory fire in which everyone was burnt to death as well,” he recalls, as he sweeps away ashes on the floor.

Scores of burnt bodies – and body parts – lie wrapped in white cotton shrouds, tucked away on stretchers of the morgue.

The stench of burnt flesh pervades the hall which was crammed with 37 charred bodies of passengers of the ill-fated bus that collided with a truck early Saturday. Outside the hall, some relatives of the victims cling to their cell phones, while some carry photographs of their loved ones to help in the identification.

“I took these [pictures] from their houses, but I think these are useless now,” says Salman, as he chokes. He has come to the Edhi mortuary to identify his friends, Zafar and Khalid. “I came here to take their bodies to their parents so that they can bury them.”

Shakir, who lives in Lyari, Karachi, is also waiting outside the mortuary. “Akhtar and Tanveer were in the bus and since the accident, their phones are not responding,” he says about his friends who were coming from Balochistan in the bus. “But all bodies are burnt. They decompose if you touch them,” he exclaims. “I could not even differentiate between a man and a woman. God save us from such days.”

“We have identified the drivers of the two trucks – only because their bodies were found in the driving seats,” says Ahmed Edhi, the assistant in-charge of Edhi Karachi Zone. One of the bodies has been handed over to the heirs, he adds. Thirty-six bodies remain in the mortuary but they can only be identified after DNA tests.

Edhi spokesperson Anwar Kazmi says that male and female recognition is not possible but they know that five bodies are of children.

The Sindh Health Department has set up an information desk at the Edhi Cold Storage for the collections of samples for DNA identification.


Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2014.