Tuesday, Indian authorities made impassioned pleas to families to help identify more than 100 unclaimed bodies kept in hospitals and mortuaries after 275 people were killed in the country’s deadliest rail accident in more than two decades.
On Friday, a passenger train crashed with a stalled goods train, leaped the tracks, and collided with another passenger train in the other direction near Balasore, Odisha.
Sunday night, trains resumed operating on this section after constant operations to rescue survivors and remove and rebuild the track.
Approximately one hundred carcasses remained unidentified as of Monday evening, a senior state health department official told Reuters.
Odisha’s health director, Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, stated that authorities were searching for iced containers to help preserve the corpses.
“A post-mortem cannot be performed unless they are identified,” Mohapatra said, explaining that Odisha state regulations prohibit autopsies on unclaimed bodies until 96 hours have elapsed.
At the largest hospital in the state capital of Bhubaneswar, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), large television screens displayed images of the deceased to assist families in searching hospitals and mortuaries for loved ones.
Reuters was told by a senior police official that a detailed list of distinguishing characteristics had been compiled for each victim, but that relatives could view photographs, however gruesome, to identify missing loved ones.
The trains carried passengers from multiple states, and officials from seven states — Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh — were in Balasore to assist individuals in claiming the corpses and transporting the deceased to their homes, according to a police official.
A separate investigation, headed by A.M. Chowdhary, commissioner of railway safety for the south-eastern circle, began on Monday. The Railway Board of India advised the CBI to examine the disaster.
Tuesday, the CBI team will arrive at the scene and begin its investigation.
The railway police issued a criminal negligence report without naming any suspects.
According to preliminary findings, a signal failure was likely the cause of the accident, as the Coromandel Express, which was traveling south to Chennai from Kolkata, veered off the main line and onto a loop track — a side track used to park trains — at 128 kilometers per hour (80 miles per hour), colliding with a stationary good train.
This collision caused the locomotive and the first four or five coaches of the Coromandel Express to jump the tracks, topple, and collide with the last two coaches of the Yeshwantpur-Howrah train, which was traveling in the opposite direction on the second main track at 126 kilometers per hour.
