Bodies remain unidentified four days after crash

BALASORE, India — Indian authorities made fervent appeals to families on Tuesday to help identify 83 unclaimed bodies kept in hospitals and mortuaries after the death toll in the country’s deadliest rail crash in over two decades rose to 288.

The disaster struck on Friday, when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the tracks and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near the district of Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha.

Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, health director of Odisha, told Reuters that authorities were trying to source iced containers to help preserve the unclaimed bodies.

“Unless they are identified, a post mortem cannot be done,” Mohapatra said, explaining that under Odisha state regulations no autopsy can be conducted on an unclaimed body until 96 hours have passed.

The state government revised the death toll upward to 288, from 275 earlier, and said that 205 dead bodies have been identified and handed over. The remaining 83 will be preserved, Odisha Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena said.

At state capital Bhubaneswar’s biggest hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, large television screens displayed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are scouring hospitals and mortuaries for friends and relatives.