Colombo: Some hid their eyes, some collapsed in tears as gruesome images of victims from Sri Lanka’s Easter massacre were projected on to a screen in front of distraught relatives at a Colombo morgue on Monday. The pics of some of the 290 dead are disturbing, with faces battered and bodies missing limbs. A Roman Catholic priest and a Buddhist counterpart waited in the corner of the courtyard to intervene when one of scores in the audience recognised a mother, brother or child.
Most of the dead have been taken to the government morgue and people queued in the heat to get into the heart-wrenching identification slideshow. 18 bodies were released on Monday morning after relatives recognised a victim from the gruesome images shown in a corner of the morgue courtyard. Identification is painstaking, physically and emotionally. Many badly mutilated bodies will only be identified with the DNA of relatives, officials said. Janaka Shaktivel, 28, father of an 18-month-old son, sat in shock outside the building waiting for the body of his wife to be handed over.
