BALASORE, India — Indian authorities made fervent appeals to families on Tuesday to help identify 83 unclaimed bodies kept in hospitals and mortuaries after the death toll in the country’s deadliest rail crash in over two decades rose to 288.

The disaster struck on Friday, when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the tracks and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near the district of Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha.

Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, health director of Odisha, told Reuters that authorities were trying to source iced containers to help preserve the unclaimed bodies.

“Unless they are identified, a postmortem cannot be done,” Mohapatra said, explaining that under Odisha state regulations, no autopsy can be conducted on an unclaimed body until 96 hours have passed.

The state government revised the death toll upwards to 288, from 275 earlier, and said that 205 dead bodies have been identified and handed over. The remaining 83 will be preserved, Odisha Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena said.

At state capital Bhubaneswar’s biggest hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), large television screens displayed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are scouring hospitals and mortuaries for friends and relatives.

A detailed list was made of distinguishing features for each body, but relatives could first view photographs, however gruesome, to identify missing loved ones, a senior police official told Reuters.

The trains had passengers from several states and officials from seven states were in Balasore to help people claim the bodies and take the dead home, the police official added.

MISSING BODIES
However, all the help proved inadequate for some families.

Niranjan Patra was shocked when authorities informed him that the body of his aunt, Manju Mani Patra, who had traveled on the Coromandel Express, seemed to have been handed over to someone else.

Mr. Patra said his family identified her through the photographs of the deceased released by the government, but they were unable to find her body in any of the hospitals in Bhubaneswar.

“We don’t want the compensation, we want to perform her last rites. No one is able to tell us where her body is,” Mr. Patra said, standing at the help desk at Balasore railway station.

A forlorn Parbati Hembrum, from West Bengal’s Hooghly district, also stood near the help desk, looking for information on her son Gopal.

The 20-year-old had traveled in the Coromandel Express with three others from their village, but while the other three returned home, Gopal has not.

Tarapada Tudu, standing next to his relative Ms. Hembrum, said Gopal was admitted to Balasore hospital after the accident but when they looked for him there, the hospital said he was released the same day after being treated for minor injuries.

But, filled with dread over the lack of contact with Gopal, Mr. Tudu said he and Ms. Hembrum will travel to Bhubaneswar to look for him among the dead.

There were also incidents of double claims for dead bodies.

“In those cases we are going for DNA sampling and matching. We have already preserved the DNA of the dead bodies,” senior police official Prateek Singh told reporters.

A team from the federal Central Bureau of Investigation reached the site on Tuesday to start a probe into the cause of the disaster. A separate inquiry by the railway’s safety commission started on Monday.

A signal failure was the likely cause of the disaster, according to preliminary findings, which indicated the Coromandel Express, heading southbound to Chennai from Kolkata, moved off the main line and entered a loop track — a sidetrack used to park trains — at 128 kph (80 mph), crashing into the stationary freight train.

That crash caused the engine and first four or five coaches of the Coromandel Express to jump the tracks, topple and hit the last two coaches of the Yeshwantpur-Howrah train heading in the opposite direction at 126 kph on the second main track. — Reuters

A MAN armed with four handguns killed two people and wounded five others when he fired into a crowd outside a high school graduation ceremony in Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday, police said.

Police said they arrested one suspect, a 19-year-old man who knew one of the victims and shot at him amid the crowd that had just emerged from the Huguenot High School’s commencement ceremony inside a theater on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University.

The suspect was likely to be charged with two counts of second-degree murder in addition to other offenses, interim Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards told a press conference.

Mr. Edwards called the shooter’s behavior “disgusting and cowardly,” since his dispute appeared to be with just one person.

“When you have a crowd like this, innocent people are going to be caught up in the mayhem, and that’s what happened today. “ Mr. Edwards said. “Obviously, this should have been a safe space… It’s just incredibly tragic that someone decided to bring a gun to this incident and rain terror on our community.”

The United States has grown accustomed to mass shootings in public places such as schools, shopping centers and churches.

The mass shooting was the country’s 279^th in the first 157 days of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, using the definition of four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter.

The deceased were men aged 18 and 36, Mr. Edwards said. He did not confirm a WWBT television news report that the victims were father and son. Among the wounded, a 31-year-old man suffered life-threatening injuries and four other males aged 14, 32, 55 and 58 were expected to survive, Edwards said.

In addition, a 9-year-old girl was struck by a car in the chaos that ensued, and multiple other people were injured in falls or suffered from anxiety, Mr. Edwards said.

The suspect fled the scene on foot and was captured in possession of four handguns, three of which may have been fired, he said, stressing that it was too early in the investigation to be certain. — Reuters