Tag Archives: corpses

At least 8 dead in mangrove after gun battle with Rio police

By Rodrigo Viga Gaier

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) -Residents on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro on Monday found the corpses of at least eight people in a mangrove after a sustained gun battle with local police.

The bodies were found near a complex of slums called Salgueiro, in the city of Sao Goncalo, a poor and violent region that is part of metropolitan Rio.

Locals told media outlets that they believed other bodies would be found.

“The bodies were all thrown into a mangrove swamp, with signs of torture. They were tossed one on top of the other. This was clearly a massacre,” one resident told the G1 news website.

Other residents, who also declined to be named, gave similar accounts to other outlets.

The bodies were found after a weekend-long operation in the area, which began after a local police officer died while on patrol on Saturday. Sao Gonacalo is overseen by the 7th battalion, which has long been one of Rio state’s most deadly.

Rio’s military police did not respond to locals’ accusations of officers having been involved in torture or multiple killings but said in a statement: “So far, eight bodies have been found.”

Police said they had entered the region to “stabilize” it after violence from alleged drug gangs.

They said officers would remain in the area to allow civil police officers to investigate.

In 2019, Reuters reported on the shooting to death of a local resident by officers from the 7th amid a sharp rise in police killings. So far this year, officers from the 7th battalion killed 1,096 people, the highest of any battalion in the state, and up 17% from the first nine months of last year.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Viga GaierWriting and additional reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Alison Williams and David Gregorio)

Swelling Ganges opens up India’s riverside graves

By Ritesh Shukla and Saurabh Sharma

PRAYAGRAJ, India (Reuters) – More corpses are washing up on the banks of the Ganges in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, as rains swell the river and expose bodies buried in shallow graves during the peak of the country’s latest wave of coronavirus infections.

Videos and pictures in May of bodies drifting down the river, which Hindus consider holy, shocked the nation and underlined the ferocity of the world’s biggest surge in infections.

Though cases have come down drastically this month, the Uttar Pradesh city of Prayagraj alone has cremated 108 bodies found in the river in the last three weeks, said a senior municipal official.

“These are those dead bodies which were buried very close to the river and have gone into it with the rise in its water levels,” Neeraj Kumar Singh told Reuters.

“The municipal corporation has deployed a team of 25 people who are working day and night on this front.”

Reuters saw more than a dozen riverside pyres burning a few miles from Prayagraj.

India, the world’s second most populous country, saw its health infrastructure crushed in April and May. Hospitals ran out of beds and life-saving oxygen and crematoriums became overwhelmed with the dead.

The government of Uttar Pradesh, home to 240 million people, acknowledged in May that bodies of COVID-19 victims were being dumped into rivers in a practice likely stemming from poverty and families abandoning victims for fear of the disease.

“Instructions have been passed to every district magistrate to cremate the dead bodies with proper respect,” said Uttar Pradesh government spokesperson Navneet Sehgal.

“There are dead bodies buried on the river bank and it is because of a local tradition.”

The state reported 224 COVID-19 infections overnight, taking its total caseload to 1.7 million, while total fatalities are at 22,366.

(Reporting by Ritesh Shukla in Prayagraj, Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Death stalks French nursing home, where corpses lie in rooms

By Lucien Libert

PARIS (Reuters) – In a nursing home in Paris, bodies have been left decomposing in bedrooms and the smell of death seeps under doors after the coronavirus spread through the overwhelmed facility, according to a care worker there.

The employee at the Jardin des Plantes home, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, told Reuters some 30 residents – about a third of all the elderly being cared for at the facility – had died since the outbreak struck.

With the city’s undertakers swamped by the wave of COVID-19 deaths sweeping the capital, some corpses had laid in body bags for several days, the care worker said.

“The smell passes under the doors and permeates through the walls,” the care worker said.

“Families would call in the morning, and we’d tell them things were fine. By the evening their relative would be dead and we wouldn’t even have had the time to inform them,” the care worker added, describing how staff had been overrun.

The nursing home is run by Paris City Hall. A spokesman confirmed that the number of deaths had risen above the 21 initially reported on April 7, but could not give a precise figure.

City Hall had been alerted that some corpses were festering inside bedrooms, the spokesman said. Immediate measures had been taken “to limit as far as possible this situation”, he added.

The nursing home declined to comment.

All of France’s care homes are locked down, their 1 million residents in isolation on government orders and cut off from their families.

From Italy to the United States, such homes have emerged as a vulnerable frontline in the global pandemic, with COVID-19 most lethal to the elderly.

PARTIAL DATA

In France, nursing homes do not have to relay data on COVID-19 deaths to the health authorities.

The country’s death count has surged after it began including numbers supplied voluntarily from homes last week, with a third of the 12,210 COVID-19 fatalities nationwide occurring in nursing homes.

A spokeswoman for the regional ARS health authority in the greater Paris area said Jardin des Plantes was among the 40% of France’s 7,400 homes that had not passed on the information.

The care worker said that the home’s 80 staff had lacked face masks, gloves, gowns and shoe covers when the coronavirus first hit. High levels of absenteeism left workers overstretched before reinforcements arrived, including student nurses.

The nursing home declined to respond to questions about protective gear, which has been in short supply in many medical facilities and care homes across the world, particularly in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis.

The Paris City Hall spokesman said the municipality provided all its staff, including those working in homes, with masks.

Earlier this week, as the death toll inside the home rose, all of its surviving residents and staff were tested for COVID-19 after the health ministry changed its protocol.

Previously, as France ramped up testing capacity, the guidance was that the first two suspected cases be assessed.

Asked if the testing had come too late, the City Hall spokesman said the municipality was taking its cue from the ARS.

“We’re approaching the peak so this is a crucial time,” he said. “We’re not too late.”

(Additional reporting and writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Battle over bodies rages quietly in Iraq’s Mosul long after Islamic State defeat

Local residents carry bodies taken from the rubble in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq January 17, 2018

By Raya Jalabi

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – The Iraqis who have come home to Mosul’s Old City knew it would be hard living in the rubble left by the battle against Islamic State, but there is one aspect of their surroundings they are finding unbearable seven months on.

“I don’t want my children to have to walk past dead bodies in the street every day,” said Abdelrazaq Abdullah, back with his wife and three children in the quarter where the militants made their last stand in July against Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces.

“We can live without electricity, but we need the government to clear the corpses – they’re spreading disease and reminding us of the horrors we’ve just lived through.”

The stench of death wafts from rubble-filled corners in the dystopian wasteland of what was once West Mosul, from rusting cars still rigged with explosives and from homes abandoned as those who could, fled the bloody end of the militants three-year rule.

The corpses lying in the open on many streets are mainly militants from the extremist Sunni group who retreated to the densely-packed buildings of the Old City, where only the most desperate 5,000 of a pre-war population of 200,000 have so far returned.

Local residents and officials in predominantly Sunni Mosul say there are also thousands of civilian bodies yet to be retrieved from the ruins, a view which has put them at odds with the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad.

“There are no more civilian bodies to be picked up in Mosul,” said Brig Gen Mohammad Mahmoud, the head of Mosul’s Civil Defence, first responders who report to the Interior Ministry and are tasked with collecting them and issuing death certificates.

The Civil Defence says it had collected 2,585 civilian bodies by mid-January – many of them still unidentified – and has completed operations. It does not want to waste resources on the militants.

“Why should we have to give terrorists a proper burial?” Mahmoud said.

The standoff over the dead threatens to stoke the anger of a population already beaten down by a grueling war and the militants’ draconian rule in a place where Islamic State initially found some sympathy. The final civilian death toll is also a highly sensitive political issue in Iraq and beyond.

 

COMMON GRAVES

The municipal government has had to set up its own specialized team to field requests filed by city residents to find more than 9,000 missing people, most of them last seen in the Old City and assumed to be buried under the rubble.

The team is working through a backlog of 300 bodies, dispatching groups to collect them when it can. But these are just the ones where exact coordinates have been given by neighbors, family members or passers-by who saw the bodies.

“We don’t know how many more are under the rubble,” said Duraid Hazim Mohammed, the head of the municipal team. “If the family or a witness who saw the people die doesn’t call us to tell us exactly how many bodies are at a site, we have no way of knowing if one, five or 100 bodies are buried there.”

Locals say common graves were dug as the battle raged. In the courtyard of Um al-Tisaa mosque in the Old City, they say 100 of their neighbors were buried in groups of shallow graves.

“I buried between 50 and 60 people myself, by hand, as planes flew overhead and bombed the city,” resident Mahmoud Karim said.

Several families have since come to excavate the bodies of their relatives, to bury them in proper cemeteries. “But others, we don’t know where their families are,” Karim said. Some are dead, while others are among the thousands lingering uneasily in refugee camps or paying high rents elsewhere in the city.

The municipal government in Mosul has not given an exact figure for civilian casualties, but its head, Abdelsattar al-Hibbu, told Reuters it coincided with estimates of 10,000 civilians killed during the battle, based on reports of missing people and information from officials about the dead. The toll includes victims of ground fighting and coalition bombing.

Asked for comment, a U.S. coalition spokesman directed Reuters to publicly available reports of incidents. A tally based on those reports showed that the U.S. military acknowledges 321 deaths based on “credible allegations” in dozens of reports of civilian casualties from coalition air strikes conducted near Mosul.

A further 100 reports of casualties from coalition air strikes near Mosul, each referring either to one or to multiple deaths, were still under investigation, the data showed.

(To view an interactive graphic on battle for Mosul, click http://tmsnrt.rs/2rEoDr4)

FIGHTERS

While the most visible problem in Mosul is the corpses of fighters left in the streets, residents say they have also found bodies of suspected Islamic State family members in their homes.

The owner of a house in the Old City, who asked Reuters to withhold his name for fear of retaliation from officials, said he had asked the Civil Defence for weeks to come and remove two bodies from the main bedroom of his basement home.

They were badly decomposed but the clothing was clearly that of a woman and child.

“Civil Defence refused, because they say the woman and child are Daesh,” he said using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “They said they’re punishing me because they think I supported Daesh.”

The municipality team has collected 348 bodies of militants so far, but there are many more still around. Residents regularly walk by them to collect water from temporary pumps and on one street, young children played not far from two corpses on a doorstep.

Some of the fighters are recognizable from their clothing, some were identified to the government by neighbors, some yet, were found clutching the weapons they used to make their last stand against surrounding Iraqi and coalition forces.

The municipal government team’s efforts are hampered by very limited funds. On several days in January, they had to halt operations amid a shortage of gloves, masks and body bags.

Some families have resorted to digging out their dead themselves, like 23-year-old Mustafa Nader, who came back to look for his great-uncle Abdullah Ahmed Hussain.

“We weren’t sure if we would find him here,” Nader said of his elderly sculptor uncle, tears in his eyes after an hour of digging unearthed his body. “I thought maybe he could have left or gone to a neighbor’s house.”

Others still have resorted to drastic measures.

Ayad came back in early January after six months in a refugee camp and found the corpses of three Islamic State fighters rotting in what remained of his living room. “The flies, the smell, the disease,” he said. “It was awful.”

The municipality team said it would be weeks before they could get to him so Ayad asked a soldier on patrol to look over the bodies and make sure there were no explosives.

Then, Ayad set them on fire.

With most of his money spent on a tarp to cover the gaping hole where his front door once stood, he borrowed $20 from his sister, for bleach to try to erase the traces so his family of ten could move back in.

“The smell still hasn’t fully gone away,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Baghdad; editing by Philippa Fletcher)