{"id":522776,"date":"2026-08-30T20:32:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T00:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/uncategorized\/a-leg-a-gold-tooth-and-hundreds-of-bodies-waiting-to-be-identified-in-nepal\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T20:32:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T00:32:56","slug":"a-leg-a-gold-tooth-and-hundreds-of-bodies-waiting-to-be-identified-in-nepal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/international\/a-leg-a-gold-tooth-and-hundreds-of-bodies-waiting-to-be-identified-in-nepal\/","title":{"rendered":"A leg, a gold tooth and hundreds of bodies waiting to be identified in Nepal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Across Nepal, nearly 800 bodies and human remains have been recovered since the flash flood<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nuwakot (Nepal).-<\/strong> Of one of the dead, there is only a leg to show, and for a woman with a deeply deteriorated face, her lips were pulled apart before photographing her to make a gold tooth visible, because in front of the Kathmandu morgue, any detail that the flood has left intact may be enough for a family to recognize among the corpses<\/strong> the person they have been searching for for five days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photographs cover a metal shutter next to the entrance, full bodies and human remains, faces still covered in mud, visible clothing, and small tags with numbers and notes that family members go through one by one in search of something familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are very different images, men and women smiling, couples hugging, family portraits, selfies, travel memories, and social media screenshots pasted next to names, ages, phone numbers, and the last place someone saw them. On this side, families search among the dead for those who appear alive on the wall opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raj Bahadur Thapa has been looking both ways for five days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His brother, Deepak Pradhan, about 43 years old, disappeared in Timure, in the Rasuwa district, on Wednesday morning. The family’s last communication with him was before 8:00 a.m., and by 8:30 a.m. his phone stopped responding, the beginning of a search that has taken them on the ground, by helicopter, and through hospitals located as far away as Chitwan, dozens of kilometers from the mountains where he disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raj stood in front of these photographs on Saturday and returned on Sunday to look at them again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“On this side are the missing. On that one, those who were found dead,” he explains to EFE while pointing first to one wall and then the other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Deepak is not up to anything. “We are still looking. We are still waiting,” he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bodies keep arriving<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The wait repeats in Nuwakot, at the military base where helicopters returning from the devastated areas land<\/strong> and where hundreds of people remain gathered outside in search of news about their relatives, just as during the first days of the emergency, although five days later there is something that allows one to notice the change even before crossing the entrance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now almost everyone is wearing masks<\/strong>, the soldiers entering and leaving the facilities and also many of the people waiting outside, as far as the smell of decomposing bodies reaches, which rescue teams continue to recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the helicopters, body bags<\/strong> are lowered, which the soldiers unload and move inside, some with irregular shapes under the plastic, without the recognizable outline of a complete body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That deterioration accompanies the corpses to the hospitals. “The bodies that arrive are all in a state of decomposition and some are fragmented. We are trying to collect all identifying features and DNA samples,” a forensic expert at the Kathmandu Teaching Hospital, who had received 72 corpses from Rasuwa, Trishuli, Dhading, and other places, explained to EFE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The morgue has a capacity of 70.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“Capacity has already been exceeded,” confirmed the coroner who requested anonymity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Across Nepal, nearly 800 bodies and human remains have been recovered since the flood<\/strong> and thousands of people remain missing. Just a day earlier, when the count was still lower, the Police had classified 211 of the findings as mutilated bodies, partial remains, or severed limbs, and barely twenty had been identified by their relatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The current also scattered the bodies along tens of kilometers, from the mountains of Rasuwa and Nuwakot towards districts located downstream such as Dhading, Gorkha, Tanahun, Chitwan and Nawalparasi, forcing families who do not even know if they are looking for someone alive to scour hospitals and morgues increasingly far from the last place they saw them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A tattoo, a tooth<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When the face no longer allows a person to be recognized, the search may depend on something that until then would have hardly mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A family was able to identify a missing man in Nuwakot whose face was no longer recognizable by a tattoo he had on his chest with his wife’s name, one of the features that forensic teams try to preserve along with fingerprints, dental records, clothing, jewelry, and other belongings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The police photograph the bodies and remains, assign them a number, and record the characteristics that may still be useful for identifying them, while keeping the recovered belongings under the same code and taking DNA samples when visual recognition is no longer possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morgue photographs are now just one part of that search. The police distribute a QR code that leads to a public database of \u201cunidentified and unclaimed\u201d corpses,<\/strong> with images and data on where they were recovered, so that a family can discover from a phone that the person they are looking for in Rasuwa appeared much further down, in another district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is also how long those bodies can be kept there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The continuous arrival of corpses has exceeded the capacity of several morgues<\/strong> and authorities began burying those whom no one had been able to identify or claim, after taking DNA samples and recording the necessary information to locate them if a family manages to recognize them later. In Chitwan, the burial of 229 unidentified bodies began, each associated with a code and the location of their grave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photographs, physical characteristics, forensic reports, genetic samples, and the exact burial site then remain as the possibility of later completing an identification that could not be made when facing the corpse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raj still doesn’t know if his search will go that far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five days after losing contact with Deepak, she keeps his photograph on her phone, has searched the search areas, has flown in a helicopter, has gone to Chitwan, and has returned twice to the entrance of the Kathmandu morgue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On one wall, the photographs of those who are still missing continue to appear, and right across from them, those of the ones who have already been found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deepak is still neither among one nor the other. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Across Nepal, nearly 800 bodies and human remains have been recovered since the flash flood Nuwakot (Nepal).- Of one of the dead, there is only a leg to show, and for a woman with a deeply deteriorated face, her lips were pulled apart before photographing her to make a gold tooth visible, because in front […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":522777,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[44763,44182,40237,17158],"class_list":["post-522776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-international","tag-bodies","tag-cover","tag-flood","tag-nepal"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/phj1q1-2bZS","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/Copia-de-Copia-de-Post-de-Instagram-Feliz-Cumpleanos-Sencillo-Minimalista-Azul-1000-x-500-px-2026-08-30T202722.467.png","dum_api":{"author_name":"EFE","author_image":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/1200px-EFE_logo.svg-96x96.png","categories_name":["International"],"featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/Copia-de-Copia-de-Post-de-Instagram-Feliz-Cumpleanos-Sencillo-Minimalista-Azul-1000-x-500-px-2026-08-30T202722.467.png"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}