DNA Collected Before Mass Burial: Entire City Becomes a Morgue

[Anchor]

In Nepal, bodies are piling up by the hundreds every day. Unidentified and unable to be returned to their families, they are being buried in mass graves.

Reporter Kim Young-a brings us the local situation.

[Reporter]

An excavator digs into the middle of a jungle.

Nearby, soldiers are placing number tags into flowerpots and securing them with cement.

These serve as "gravestones" to be placed on the graves of unidentified bodies.

[Anil Thapa / Police Inspector, Chitwan: The bodies discovered were already in a severely decomposed state, making it very difficult to enshrine them in urban areas. Therefore, we inevitably had to proceed with burial work here.]

To ensure families can find them later, identification numbers have been marked alongside the DNA information of the bodies.

At a temporary mass grave set up near Bharatpur in the Chitwan district, some 270 unidentified bodies have already been buried.

Bharatpur, a city along the lower reaches of the Narayani River, is located some 200 kilometers away from the areas struck by the massive flood.

However, because it is a flat area where the valleys end and the current slows down sharply, bodies are piling up at a rate of as many as 100 a day.

[Bimsen Devkota / Major, Nepalese Army: From this morning until now, we have recovered 10 intact bodies and 2 other bodies. The search operation will not stop here and will continue.]

The maximum capacity of the mortuary freezers at Bharatpur Hospital is 24 bodies.

With the remaining bodies left unattended in hallways and courtyards, the entire city has been engulfed in the stench of death.

Families of the missing crowd the registration desk in front of the mortuary all day long.

However, only about 10 bodies have been successfully matched with their families so far.

This is because the bodies were severely damaged while being swept down by rushing currents and debris flows.

The Nepalese government has requested support from the international community for mortuary freezers and DNA analysis equipment to prevent the decomposition of the bodies and assist with identification.

(Video editing: Lee Seung-yul, Design: Lee Jun-ho)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.