WAYANAD LANDSLIDES

Big relief: DNA results help identify Wayanad landslide victims' body parts

It's been a long, painful wait. Some of the relatives of 119 people who were tagged as missing in the Wayanad landslide disaster in Kerala have started receiving calls from police station saying that there is a DNA match.

Manoj V, a resident of worst-hit Chooralmala, was told a number (a unique identification number created for each body as part of DNA sampling) -- it belonged to his mother Omana. She was buried among the unidentified bodies at Puthumala. On Sunday Manoj went to Puthumala, spotted where his mother was buried, lit agarbatis and prayed. He now knows his mother's final resting place. A week ago, he had offered bali (offerings to ancestors) for his brother Mahesh, his mother Omana and his father Vasu. Mahesh and his daughter Aradhya are still missing. His father Vasu's body was found earlier. Manoj hasn't been able to settle down in his rented house at Meppadi. He used to be a driver. "I don't wish to go back to Chooralmala. There is nothing left," he said.

For others, the wait goes on and every single day it hurts. Somali Panda, sister of Dr Swadhen Panda from Odisha who went missing in the landslide, takes care of her parents Sakuntala Das and Himanshu Sekha Panda in Bhubaneswar. Every day she rings up available contacts with Kerala authorities, hoping for some information about her brother. She had sent DNA samples of parents to Kerala on August 17. She browses the pictures Swadhen had sent her from Wayanad. He was touring Wayanad with his friends and was about to take a flight back home on July 30. "He did a video call that night. It was raining heavily. He said it was fine. The next day I got a call from one of his friends and I knew something was wrong," said Somali. She immediately flew to Kerala.

Somali would spend 5-6 hours in mortuaries of different hospitals, looking for her brother. She moved from one hospital to another for more than a week. Later she went to Chooralmala and saw the scale of disaster. "We were like best friends, always in touch, sharing updates. He always checked on me, asking if I was okay. It should have been the other way around. We got our relatives here who have come from abroad, we all pray for him. We sometimes hope that he is still alive, he would have got lost after being injured. My parents know what may have happened,"says Somali who is an HR consultant in Bhubaneswar.

Bijoy B, another resident of Chooralmala, is yet to find his mother Shakunthala. He got a call from the police station the other day. There was a match for his father's brother Balachandran who had been missing. He plans to go to Puthumala and do the rituals. There was another call -- it was a match for his father's another brother Vijayan and his son Nikhil. But both of them had been identified earlier and were buried. "We were told that their body parts had been buried in three different places with same numbers. DNA was a match for those body parts. We had buried them earlier, their body parts were recovered later though," says Bijoy, a two-wheeler mechanic. He was in Malappuram along with his family when the landslide occurred. All of their houses had the same name "Krishna Nivas", named after his grandfather. "We only have that address left now. All houses have been lost. We don't plan to return ever to Chooralmala," says Bijoy.

DNA samples are being cross-matched at the Regional Forensic Laboratory in Kannur. It is learnt that so far 66 samples have been cross-matched and names identified.