Only dismembered bodies under Shikhar debris

Among the relatives and friends waiting nearby, looks of disbelief slowly turned into painful wails and screams. As minutes ticked by on a wall clock that miraculously hung on a wall of the collapsed building, bodies kept tumbling out from under the concrete slabs and debris. In two hours, the count reached 29 and the workers took a break because they ran out of blankets and cloth being used as body bags.

After about 15 minutes of sifting through the rubble, the two giant earth movers suddenly stopped. There was a faint outline of a baby underneath a pillar. The operators hesitated to pull aside the pillar fearing that the huge claws of the earthmover would “hurt” the baby. Young volunteers extricated the body, sifting aside concrete and mangled steel using bare hands even as some bystanders burst into tears.

At one point, when a huge block of concrete was shifted aside, bodies of an entire family, some of whose arms and legs were severed, lay there. As bodies stuck under mangled steel and concrete were extricated, all hopes of somebody being alive in there died too. Army personnel said most of the bodies that could be seen but were stuck under the concrete piles were dismembered. “It is getting difficult to extricate them now and they now they have begun to decompose,” one officer said.

Grieving relatives and friends — shocked at the sight of body parts being brought out — simply didn’t know how to recognise them. Many couldn’t even bear to take a look. “Some of them are in a state of shock. They are not even able to properly give the names of their relatives who are dead,” said RAF personnel who have helped retrieve 44 bodies till now.