More than 250 bodies have been recovered in the southern district of Chitwan. Only nine have been identified by relatives.
MOURNERS cremate the body of deceased victim Ayush Khadka, after flash floods in Nepal's Chitwan district on 31 August 2026.
PRAKASH MATHEMA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
BHARATPUR, Nepal (AFP) — Distraught families in Nepal watched grisly images of mangled corpses on a screen on Sunday, seeking to identify relatives as overflowing morgues forced authorities to begin burying flood victims.
In a building next to a makeshift morgue in Bharatpur, Shobha Adhikary emerged from the crowd after scanning the LED screen.
She told a local coordinator she believed the 37th image — showing the pale, swollen face of a man lying on a pebbled riverbed — was her childhood best friend.
“It looks like him, for sure,” she said, showing coordinators a photograph of a smiling, middle-aged man.
“My husband and I are best friends with Rajkumar and his wife Geeta,” she said. Geeta has also been missing since a lethal wall of water and debris ripped through the Nepal-China border on Wednesday.
Nepal’s disaster agency said on Sunday it had recovered more than 750 bodies, with at least 2,500 people missing.
Hundreds of bodies were swept downstream, and the tolls continue to rise.
Bharatpur is close to the Indian border — roughly 160 kilometers downstream of the epicenter of the disaster which the United States Geological Survey said was caused by a glacial collapse.
More than 250 bodies have been recovered in the southern district of Chitwan. Only nine have been identified by relatives.
‘Number-tagged’
Devastating floods near the border with China have killed at least 903 people in Nepal, while the number of missing in the country has soared to 4,247, its disaster authority said Monday, as rescue efforts entered a sixth day.
Chinese state media earlier confirmed 16 dead and 546 people missing in Tibet following Wednesday’s disaster, taking the overall toll to 919 dead and 4,793 missing.
Nepal’s list of the missing includes 592 foreigners.
It also includes 933 workers on hydropower projects along the river which the torrent crashed through, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.
The morgue at the local hospital in Bharatpur is equipped to hold only a couple dozen bodies.
Authorities have been forced to store corpses at a temporary holding center — the air-conditioned offices of the district commerce association.
But without proper freezing facilities, it is only a short-term arrangement.
“Many of the bodies were starting to badly decompose, and there was an unbearable stench in the whole area,” said Rudra Adhikary, a member of the district Red Cross committee.
“So they were buried after collection of DNA.”
Some 90 bodies were buried in shallow graves on Saturday, district authorities said in a statement.
An Agence France-Presse correspondent saw workers digging dozens more graves on Sunday in a forest clearing on the outskirts of the town.
The dead are traditionally cremated on funeral pyres in Hindu-majority Nepal, and the burials are viewed as long-term storage until families can retrieve them.
“The depth of the graves is 1.5 meters; the bodies are 40 centimeters apart from each other,” Adhikary said.
“Each body is being number-tagged and wrapped in a plastic bag before burial.”
