Bodies may never be found in Nepal flood, warns forensic expert

Richard Bassed has spent his career in the spaces between catastrophe and closure. After the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, he spent three months in Thailand helping to identify the dead. He was there again in 2009 when Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people. Now, as the head of forensic medicine at Melbourne's Monash University, he is watching from a distance as Nepal and Tibet grapple with a disaster that may prove harder to resolve than either of those.

Last week's flash flood has claimed more than 1,250 confirmed lives, with over 5,000 people still missing. Bassed has seen the reports, studied the terrain, and arrived at a sobering conclusion: some of the dead will never be found. Others will be recovered but never identified. The reasons are not mysterious. The landscape is punishing—bodies can be swept miles downstream, buried under metres of mud, lodged in places no one will think to look. The infrastructure is fragile. Communications between Nepal and Tibet are difficult. Morgues are already full. Resources are stretched. "They could be washed anywhere, buried under mud," Bassed said. "I imagine there's a number they'll never find. I imagine they'll be finding bodies next year."

He knows this from experience. After the 2004 tsunami, which killed roughly 230,000 people across the Indian Ocean, the recovery and identification process took a year just to process 5,000 bodies—and even then, some could not be matched to anyone. Authorities are still finding remains from the 2011 Japanese tsunami, more than a decade later. The Nepal-Tibet flood, by comparison, is smaller in absolute numbers but far more complicated by geography and politics. The terrain makes recovery dangerous; more mudslides are possible. The international border creates coordination headaches. The mix of nations and religions means different cultural expectations about burial and mourning, which can slow the process or create conflict over how remains should be handled.

Nepal's authorities are moving quickly on identification. This week, police asked relatives of missing tourists to provide DNA samples and passport photographs to the pathology laboratory at the police hospital in Kathmandu. DNA profiling has improved dramatically in recent years and is now the primary tool for matching remains to the missing. But DNA alone is not enough. In Nepal, many identifications will rely on photographs, dental records where they exist, or distinguishing marks—tattoos, jewellery, surgical implants. Fingerprints, Bassed notes, are often unusable after prolonged exposure to water and mud.

First responders—often local volunteers with no forensic training—are being asked to follow international guidelines for handling bodies. They tag each corpse with a unique code, photograph it along with any identifying features, place it in a body bag, and store it in a marked location. The system works, but only if the infrastructure holds. In Nepal, morgues are already overwhelmed. Mass burials are taking place as DNA samples are collected, a grim race against decomposition and space.

Technology offers some hope, though with significant caveats. Researchers are developing algorithms that could match passport or driver's licence photos to remains, and CT scanning can sometimes extract serial numbers from joint replacements. Facial recognition software, used controversially in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, could theoretically help. But these tools require electricity, running water, stable internet, and money—luxuries in a disaster zone. Helicopters could carry CT scanners into remote areas, but the cost is enormous, and the logistics are complex. "You need running water, you need electricity," Bassed said. "You could put CT scanners into helicopters, but all this costs an awful lot of money."

When asked how he manages the weight of this work—the scale of death, the randomness of it—Bassed is candid. He has never found it long-term traumatising. He maintains what he calls a clinical face, does the work carefully, and knows it serves a purpose. But there are moments that break through. Children affect him. And the sheer randomness of disaster—the way a tsunami or a flood takes one person and spares another, the way bodies end up in places no one predicted—that stays with him. For now, in Nepal and Tibet, the work of finding and identifying the dead is just beginning. It will take months, perhaps years. Some families will get answers. Others will not.