Nepal has named 112 of 1,454 flood dead, and 5,285 people are still missing

Nepal has identified and returned 112 of the 1,454 bodies recovered from the August floods, and 5,285 people are still listed as missing. About a third of the recovered bodies are partial remains. More than 1,200 have been buried with numbers and tags so that a later DNA match can bring them back up. AFP reported the figures from Nuwakot, where Rajesh Ram is waiting on a test to learn whether one of the numbered graves is his son.

The floods hit the Bhotekoshi and the valleys that feed it, in Rasuwa and neighbouring districts, in August. The missing list includes hundreds of foreigners. On the Chinese side of the same weather system the count is 43 dead and 519 missing. Added together, the two countries are near 1,500 dead and 5,800 missing. Those are the round numbers AFP used on 3 October. The Nepali operational numbers underneath them are the ones that show why identification, not recovery, is now the constraint.

A total of 3,685 forensic samples are in DNA testing, including more than 1,300 taken from recovered bodies. Blood from a living relative is the faster sample. A tooth or a piece of bone can take several days to profile. Police spokesman Abi Narayan Kafle said a large number of people are missing and that the bodies which have been found are difficult to identify. Visual identification fails when the remains are partial, when they have been in water, or when no relative is present who knew the person. The tag-and-bury method is the workaround. The grave keeps a number. The lab keeps the profile. A match joins them later.

The laboratory picture, from a more detailed count published in mid-September, shows how slow that join is. The National Forensic Science Laboratory in Khumaltar had by then received 1,660 samples: 837 from bodies, mostly teeth and bone, and 823 blood samples from relatives. Of the 837 body samples, results were back for about 195. A Chinese team at the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology was running about 200 more. The rest sat with the Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Samakhushi. Nirajan Thapa, head of the DNA branch at the national laboratory, told OnlineKhabar that at the pace then under way the full identification, bodies and relatives together, could take about two and a half months. The October figures are higher than the September ones, which means collection has continued and the queue has not cleared.

Fingerprints and facial recognition are being used where a hand or a face survives. They do not cover the partial remains, which are a third of the 1,454. For those, DNA is the only path, and DNA requires a relative's sample as well as a body sample. Families who have not yet given blood cannot be matched, even if their relative is already in a numbered grave. That is why collection of relatives' samples was still open in September and why Ram, in Nuwakot, is holding a photograph rather than a death certificate.

The arithmetic for a family is harsh and simple. Of 1,454 recovered bodies, 112 have gone home. More than 1,200 are in tagged graves. The gap between those two figures is the unidentified remainder still in mortuaries or awaiting burial. Against that, 5,285 names are on the missing list. Most of those people have no body yet. Some of them will match a sample already in the 3,685. Many will not, because the river did not return them. The lab cannot close a missing-person file without either a body or a decision, months from now, to stop waiting.

Thapa's two-and-a-half-month estimate was a September statement about one laboratory's queue. It is not a promise that every family will have an answer in November. It is a measure of capacity: teeth and bone, a few hundred results in hand, and a missing list five times longer than the body count. The tags in the ground are there so that when a profile does match, the grave can be opened. Until then the number on the tag is the only name the dead have.