Indian officials are asking families to help identify more than 100 bodies that haven’t been claimed after the country’s worst train accident in over 20 years.
On Friday, 275 people were killed when a passenger train hit a freight train that was stopped, jumped the tracks, and hit another passenger train going the other way.
The accident happened in the eastern state of Odisha, near the town of Balasore.
After people worked nonstop to get people out of the wreck and clear and fix the track, trains started running again on that part of the line on Sunday night.
A top state health department official told Reuters that around 100 bodies had not been identified as of Monday night.
Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, who is in charge of health in Odisha, said that officials were looking for iced containers to keep the bodies cool.
“Unless they are identified, we can’t do an autopsy,” Mohapatra said, adding that Odisha state law says that an unclaimed body can’t have an autopsy done for 96 hours.
At the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the largest hospital in the state capital Bhubaneswar, big TV screens showed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are searching hospitals and morgues for friends and family.
On Tuesday, a team from the Central Bureau of Investigation is set to arrive at the scene and start their investigation.
Police from the railway filed a case of criminal carelessness, but they didn’t name any suspects.
From what we know so far, the accident was probably caused by a signal failure.
