Published on June 27, 2005

Police say there are more bodies than reported missing

For six months, Urai Sirisuk, 46, has not had a single day off work from her seafood stall in the evening market in front of Bang Muang Temple in Phang Nga’s Takua Pa district – for her, keeping busy is the only way to escape the trauma of knowing she will never see her daughter again.

The December 26 tsunami took her 4-year-old daughter, Rattanawadi, away from her and no one, despite her heart-rending pleas for assistance, has been able to find the child’s body.

“Her body has not been found yet . . . I want to see my daughter,” cried Urai, half a year after the massive and relentless wall of water smashed into the girl and her 23-year-old sister in Ban Nam Khem village, one of the worst hit areas in Thailand.

“Before the wave struck our seafront house, my 23-year-old daughter heard Burmese workers shouting that a big wave was coming. She went to take a look and then rushed to take her younger sister to the motorcycle to escape,” Urai recounted.

The elder daughter was injured but her little sister disappeared into the maelstrom that swept over their house. On that day, Urai had been to Ranong and she came back to find a sea of dead bodies and wrecked houses at Ban Nam Khem.

Like her neighbours, the distraught mother kept up a constant round of visits to the Yan Yao and Bang Muang temples where thousands of the tsunami victims’ corpses were stored for identification during the first weeks after the tragedy, though she knew that seeing the body of her daughter would overwhelm her.

Earlier last week, she received a call from the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Centre (TTVI) in Phuket’s Ban Mai Khow Cemetery, saying they had found a body that might match the description of her daughter.

“They asked me whether my girl had a decayed anterior tooth. I just collapsed. The thought of seeing her body struck me,” she said, “But when they asked whether she had two molar teeth removed, I was let down.”

Urai’s story is typical of so many surviving relatives of the tsunami, whether half way across the globe or at the seaside Ban Nam Khem where the residents who died are still being identified every week. The latest one to be cremated was yesterday at Bang Muang Temple.

For those whose loved ones have not been identified yet, no one knows where they are – in the main TTVI site in Phuket, in a smaller TTVI site in Ban Bang Maruan, Phang Nga, or lost forever in the treacherous sea.

After a much-publicised turf war, the police-led TTVI was authorised by the government in January to take control of the bodies and identification was taken off the forensic team under Central Institute of Forensic Science Deputy Director-general Khunying Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand.

Pol General Nopadol Somboonsub, deputy commissioner general of the Royal Thai Police who supervises the work of the TTVI, said the problem was that the current number of the bodies was higher than that of the reported missing persons.

According to the TTVI, as of Friday, the current database reported 785 persons still missing in the tsunami, namely 516 Thais and 269 foreigners, but there are 1,976 bodies in the two TTVI sites.

Nopadol said the TTVI team had used dental records to identify about three quarters of the victims named so far, while DNA matching accounted for less than 3 per cent of the total number of identified bodies.

Migrant workers could account for this discrepancy and officials will cross-check with the database of 60,000 migrant workers in the six tsunami-hit provinces to identify the remaining bodies, Nopadol said.

He expected the identification of the remaining bodies of foreigners, excluding migrant workers, could be finished by the end of this year.

TTVI Joint Chief of Staff Pol Colonel Ponprasert Ganjanarintr said the centres had identified 1,738 bodies so far, including 1,559 foreigners and 179 Thais.

“Our work might be a bit slow but the results are sure,” he said.

Now over 120 police forensic experts from over 30 countries are working at the TTVI centres.

Phermsak Lilakul

The Nation

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