Nepal begins burials as flood death toll rises to 752
Nepal has begun temporarily burying some of the hundreds of bodies recovered following devastating floods, after authorities collected DNA samples and documented the remains to enable families to identify and retrieve them later.
The decision was announced on Sunday as the country’s disaster ministry raised the number of recovered bodies to 752, while 2,502 people remained missing.
The figure includes 589 foreigners reported missing.
Nepal’s Foreign Secretary, Amrit Bahadur Rai, said the bodies being buried had been carefully documented, while appealing for international assistance to provide adequate facilities for storing the remains.
Rai said Nepal needed more than 1,000 freezer units to safely preserve the bodies recovered from the disaster.
The burials are considered temporary because bodies are traditionally cremated on funeral pyres in Hindu majority Nepal. Authorities said families would be allowed to exhume the remains later for the necessary funeral rites.
“Following standard and accepted protocols, such as those of ICRC (Red Cross), the mortal remains of the dead, especially those not recognisable… have been temporarily buried,” Rai told reporters.
He said medical teams collected DNA samples from each victim before burial to assist with identification and enable relatives to match the remains.
“Medical teams took DNA samples from every victim prior to the burial so that families can match-reference later, and would be allowed to exhume for necessary rituals,” he added.
Rai said Nepal had appealed to several countries for freezer units and DNA testing kits as authorities struggled to safely preserve the large number of bodies recovered.
“We have requested different countries for freezers; we will need more than a thousand,” he said.
“Many dead bodies have been collected, and they have started decomposing. To preserve public health, we had to bury the decomposing bodies,” Rai added.
Meanwhile, Chinese state media reported 16 deaths in Tibet and 546 people missing following Wednesday’s disaster.
With the figures from Nepal and Tibet combined, the reported death toll stands at 768, while 3,048 people remain unaccounted for.