Belt, rings to identify husband's body

SURI: Two men were discovered in the smashed up guard's cabin of Vananchal Express when only one should have been there. While one of them was identified as Arunabha Mukhopadhyay, the train guard from Andal, the identity of the other remained a mystery till late on Tuesday afternoon.
The riddle was solved when the victim's wife walked in and identified him as Debasis Das, an Eastern Railway cabinman posted at Rampurhat.
Das, who was from the signalling and telecommunications department, was travelling to Dhanbad for training. He boarded the guard's cabin of Vananchal Express at Rampurhat. But the trip ended on the tracks 28 km later when the Uttar Banga Express rammed into the train at Sainthia station.
So disfigured and mutilated was Das' body (the guard's cabin at the end of Vananchal Express bore the maximum impact of the collision) that his wife Shiuli could not muster up enough courage to look at the body long enough to identify it the first time on Monday evening.
On Tuesday, when the 21 unidentified bodies were about to be transported to Burdwan medical college & hospital for preservation at its morgue that is better-equipped, Shiuli rushed in and pleaded she be allowed to look at the bodies once again.
Though her face was puffed due to incessant crying, her eyes bore a steely resolve as she grit her teeth and had a look at the corpses. Finally, she was able to identify her husband and broke into tears. Her son Rajdeep, aged 7 years, clung to her, unaware of what had gone wrong.
Hospital authorities said Das's body was badly mutilated, his face smashed beyond recognition. It was the rings on the fingers by which she had identified her husband. Later, she also recognised the leather belt he had worn on Saturday night before leaving for the station to catch a train to Dhanbad.
With Siuli recognising her husband's body, 41 of the 61 dead have been identified. Of these 41, bodies of 38 victims have been handed over to relatives. Three have been held back as family members are yet to produce documents. One of them is the body of 20-year-old Sanjit Kumar. Ganesh Pandit, his uncle, identified the body and is waiting for other family members to arrive with documents.
Railway officials are hopeful the rest of the bodies will also be identified because they are not decomposed like in the Jnaneswari Express case. In the latter, three DNA tests revealed the identity of eight persons while another 39 are yet to be identified two months after the gruesome accident.
"In this case, most of the victims were poor labourers from interior villages of Bihar or Jharkhand. Their families are yet to come forward to identify. Some may be on the way. Others may still not know that someone was travelling on the train. The bodies are in a state that they can be recognised," a doctor said.
Fifteen year-old Mitul Sheikh, for instance, was in a state of shock after the mutilated body of his father. He then began howling as images of the mutilated bodies flashed before his eyes. Prasenjit Saha was inconsolable as well after identifying the body of his brother Prashanta.
While identifying the bodies may not pose a major challenge, the district administration and railway officials may encounter a problem with matching dismembered limbs with the bodies. There is also a bag of intestine that will be sent for inquest.
Another problem will be authenticating the claimants. Since most of the dead were in unreserved compartments and the railways don't have a list of passengers, authenticating bona fide passengers will be a problem. "We are releasing an ad-hoc amount of Rs 25,000 in addition to the carriage cost of bodies to families who are identifying the dead. The remaining amount will be handed out later by cheque," an official said.