Hospital workers have been struggling to identify the victims from Sunday’s deadly Sri Lanka bombings, according to a report.
“They are so disfigured. With some of the children it’s just their shoes,” said Father Shelton Dias, of the Archdiocese of Colombo, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
“That’s all.”
Shelton visited Colombo’s National Hospital on Monday and tried to help local officials link up family members with lost loved ones.
Many would come to find out that their relatives died in the Easter attacks — carried out by religious extremists at hotels and churches across the Sri Lankan capital — but their injuries were too severe for them to be recognized by mortuary workers.
“It’s very difficult to identify the bodies,” said Shelton. “Terrorism has no mercy.”
Catholic officials have been attempting to locate the missing and identify the dead using their church network, according to Al Jazeera. Two of the bombings on Sunday went down at Catholic churches in Colombo.
“People came as a family to church, especially to Sunday Mass,” Shelton said. “They sat as a family. They died as a family.”
A nurse at the National Hospital told Al Jazeera that authorities were bringing in victims by the dozens on Sunday — many of whom were already dead.
“Over the last three decades we’ve faced many disasters,” said Pushpa De Soysa, a triage nurse. “But we have never had anything like this.”
Interpol plans to deploy a team of of experts on Tuesday — who specialize in crime scene examination and victim identification — to aid Sri Lankan authorities in their investigation.
“Information to help identify individuals linked to these attacks could come from anywhere in the world, which is where INTERPOL’s global network and databases can prove vital, especially for officers on the ground,” explained Interpol Secretary General Jürgen Stock in a statement Monday. “The families and friends of the victims of these bombings, as with every terrorist attack, require and deserve the full support of the global law enforcement community.”