30 bodies unclaimed in Pakistan bombing

The mug shots of the unclaimed dead are pasted on the morgue wall. People with careworn expressions peer at the black and white pictures, hoping yet fearing they will recognize one of the battered faces staring blankly back.

Two days after the homecoming of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shattered by Pakistan's worst terrorist attack in years, at least 30 victims of the massive suicide bombing sit in cold storage, waiting for someone to bury them.

Naseem Akhtar, a 60-year old widow, last saw her two sons alive Thursday morning, when they jumped on a bus of flag-waving, jubilant Bhutto supporters, traveling from their village on the Arabian Sea coast outside the city.

She caught sight of them again, for the final time, Saturday morning. She identified Mohammed Younus, 25, and Mohammed Yamin, 28, among the bodies wrapped in bloodied white shrouds and stacked on steel shelves inside the morgue of the Edhi Foundation.

"Oh God! What happened to me," Akhtar cried afterward, sobbing uncontrollably into her pale blue headscarf. "I'm alone now. What can I do?"

"Benazir should not have come because she knew it was going to happen. She knew that people would try to kill her, but she came to Karachi. Now you see how many people have lost their life," Akhtar said, covering her face.

Unable to pay for a funeral, or face the grief of a lonely ceremony, she told Edhi volunteers to give her sons a respectful burial and left, alone, in a motor rickshaw.

Some 122 of the 136 people killed in the midnight bombing — that authorities suspect was the work of Taliban or al-Qaida-linked militants — have been brought to the foundation from hospitals across the city to make it easier for relatives to locate missing loved ones.

So far, at least 92 have been claimed by their families, but the rest remain to be viewed by the steady trickle of friends or relatives.

The face of each corpse has been photographed, and photocopies of the unclaimed dead are displayed on the exterior wall of the morgue with an instruction in Urdu language: "These bodies are available in the morgue in cold storage for identification."

Anxious people shuffle into the morgue, covering their noses and mouths from the smell of death and chemicals. They pass through an outer room where slabs of ice are stored in a couple of empty coffins, before entering into the windowless, refigerated mortuary lit by bare bulbs.

Abdul Sattar Edhi, 85, who set up the foundation to cater for the dead from accidents and street violence that plagues this city of 15 million, said Thursday's attack was the biggest bombing he had seen in Karachi. He said five or six of the bodies were little more than heaps of flesh and body parts.

Mehmood Hussain, a 25-year old security guard, came looking for his cousin Ali Raza, 38, after searching at three Karachi hospitals.

Hussain and Raza had gone to see Bhutto's grand parade through Karachi that marked her return from eight years in exile — billed as heralding a new drive for democracy in Pakistan and perhaps an alliance with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to fight religious extremism.

Bhutto's passage through the city was snail-paced as as more than 150,000 supporters turned out to greet her. Hussain had to go to work in the evening, so he left Raza behind.

After a day and night of searching the city, Hussain recognized Raza in one of the mug shots on the morgue wall, partly from his familiar, scarred features, but also from the black pin-striped shirt with an embroidered collar that Hussain had been wearing. Raza had bought it for him.

A morgue worker found the ripped and bloodied garment and showed Hussain the body that had worn it.

Hussain appeared unshaken when he identified Raza. "I'm relieved," he said matter-of-factly and called Raza's brother on a cell phone in their hometown of Khairpur to collect the body for burial.

Rajab Ali, 35, said he felt in his heart something was wrong when his younger brother Mohammed Adnan, a 21-year old madrassa student, failed to come back home after going to the rally with friends. Ali traced the body at the morgue on Saturday morning.

By early afternoon, an Edhi ambulance carried the corpse to the family home in northern Karachi, bouncing down a potholed backstreet where relatives and neighbors gathered in the shade of a hastily-erected tarpaulin for the funeral prayers.

Haji Ahmad, Adnan's father, who runs a sweets and pastry shop, traveled 15 hours by train to reach Karachi after hearing that the second-youngest of his nine children was missing. "The agony I felt on that journey was unbearable," he said, tears welling.

He described Adnan as "a good boy, very hard-working" and said with pride that his son had memorized the Quran before he died.

The father sobbed into Ali's shoulder after they placed the body in a grey cot for the mourners to view — Adnan's sallow face peeking from the shroud.

___

Associated Press writer Ashraf Khan contributed to this report.