They wait for bodies of loved ones killed in India train crash

Families of the victims of India’s deadliest train crash in decades have filled a hospital in Bhubaneswar city to identify and collect bodies of relatives, as railway officials recommend the country’s premier criminal investigating agency to probe the crash that killed 275 people.

Distraught relatives of passengers killed in Friday’s crash lined up outside the city’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the eastern Odisha state.

Meanwhile, survivors being treated in the hospital said they were still trying to make sense of the horrific disaster.

Outside the hospital, two large screens cycled through photos of the victims, their faces so bloodied and charred that they were hardly recognisable.

Each body had a number assigned to it, and relatives stood near the screen and watched as the photos changed, looking out for details like clothing for clues.

Many of them said they had spent days on desperate journeys from neighbouring states, travelling in multiple trains, buses or rented cars to look for their loved ones, a process that stretched into a third day due to the gruesome nature of the injuries.

So far, only 45 bodies have been identified and 33 have been handed over to relatives, said Mayur Sooryavanshi, an administrator who was overseeing the identification process at the hospital in Odisha’s capital, about 200km (125 miles) south of the site of the train crash in Balasore.

Upendra Ram began searching for his son, Retul Ram, on Sunday after travelling some 850km (520 miles) from Bihar state. The one-day journey in a rented car was exhausting for Ram, who said Retul, 17, had been on his way to Chennai to find work.

After spending hours looking at photographs of the dead, Ram identified his son around noon on Monday.

“I just want to take the dead body and go back home. He was a very good son,” said Ram, adding that Retul had dropped out of school and wanted to earn money for the family.

“My wife and daughter can’t stop crying at home. They are asking me to bring the body back quickly,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes with a red scarf he had tied around his head.

Investigators on Sunday said a signalling failure might have caused the three-train crash, one of the worst rail disasters in the country’s history.

Authorities recommended that India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which probes serious criminal cases, open an investigation into the crash.

Meanwhile, traffic was restored partially on the tracks on Sunday evening after two days of repair work, in which hundreds of workers with excavators removed mangled coaches of the trains.