Searching for your loved ones

Kahramanmaras – Tuba Yolcu is desperate for news of her missing aunt and scours a sports hall where victims of the powerful earthquake that hit her hometown in Türkiye lie in body bags.

“We hear the authorities will no longer keep the bodies waiting after a certain period of time, they say they will take them and bury them,” she said.

“God willing we will find her,” Yolcu said, with worry etched on her face.

Last Monday’s 7.8-magnitude tremor struck Kahramanmaras in the country’s southeast, unleashing catastrophe in the region and Syria, killing at least 33 000 people.

Anguished families flocked to sports halls, hospital morgues or cemeteries in the severely hit city – where bodies were piling up – in a bid to find their missing relatives.

“Every unidentified body will eventually be returned to their family,” a prosecutor said, trying to soothe the families.

“Don’t worry, blood samples are taken from each and every missing body,” he assured.

Families – who cannot reach their loved ones during the rescue work – check one by one bodies either in bags or wrapped in blankets.

“We show the faces to their immediate relatives,” a crime scene investigator in a hazmat suit told AFP at a large grave site outside the city.

Funeral cars deliver a stream of bodies, burying them one by one.

“If the identity is unknown, we take fingerprints and tooth samples and compare them with the relatives,” said the investigator, who carries a camera around his neck.

About 2 000 bodies have been identified at the cemetery, which is filled with freshly dug graves.

Next to the wooden headstones at the makeshift cemetery, where some are wrapped by scarves, people mourn their relatives.

One woman sits near the grave, unable to stop crying.

Missing bodies are stored lower down, where investigators take pictures and notes.

Yusuf Sekman, from the religious affairs directorate, said some of the unidentified bodies are also divided according to where their collapsed building was located. –