Turkey seeking families of the missing after quake
When a powerful earthquake struck southern Turkey last month, a lawyer concluded that her relatives had been buried in the rubble of their collapsed apartment.
Three days later, rescue workers recovered the bodies of her mother and brother, she said, but days, then weeks, then a month passed with no sign of her father. His disappearance plunged her into a terrifying mystery faced by families across the quake zone whose loved ones are still missing.
“I can’t find my father anywhere in the world — not under the rubble, not in the hospitals, not anywhere,” said the lawyer, Mervat Nasri, who is from Syria.
Five weeks after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and a powerful aftershock struck southern Turkey, killing 47,000 people, many others remain unaccounted for, adding ambiguity to the complete toll and leaving families in
NARLICA, TURKEY >> an agonizing limbo. More than 6,000 people were also killed across the border in northern Syria.
Turkish authorities have provided scant information about how many people are missing, making the scope unclear. One indication is the number of unidentified bodies buried in cemeteries. Ahmet Hilal, a professor of forensic medicine at Cukurova University in Adana, said his research in the afflicted area found that there were currently about 1,470.
Recent interviews with experts, survivors and officials involved in the recovery efforts indicated chaos in the disaster’s first days, with injured people dispatched to faraway hospitals where they may have died without their relatives’ knowledge, and unidentified bodies hastily buried because rescue workers had no place to store them.
In the weeks since, Turkish authorities have begun using fingerprints, DNA tests and photographs to try to link unidentified bodies with their next of kin.
One branch of that effort is in a rocky lot in Narlica, a town in Hatay province, one of the areas most heavily damaged by the quake. On a recent day, police officers and prosecutors worked in metal shipping containers, which have been used as quake-proof shelters. A stream of families came by, hoping to find traces of missing loved ones.
Police recorded the names of missing relatives and checked a database to see if they had been found elsewhere. Families that found matches received death certificates, photographs taken before their relatives were buried, and the and grave numbers where they had been laid to rest.
Those whose relatives’ names were not in the system watched a large screen as the police scrolled through hundreds of photographs of unidentified bodies, many of them disfigured, hoping to see a face they recognized.
Some families came away with nothing. They gave blood for DNA tests that would be crosschecked with samples taken from unidentified bodies before burial.