With fingerprints, DNA and photos, Turkey is searching for the families of the missing

When a powerful earthquake struck southern Turkey last month, a lawyer concluded her relatives had been buried under the rubble of their collapsed apartment.

Three days later, rescue workers recovered the bodies of her mother and brother, she said, but days went by, then weeks, then a month without any sign of her father. His disappearance plunges her into a terrifying mystery faced by families in the earthquake zone whose loved ones are still missing.

“I can’t find my father anywhere in the world – not under the rubble, not in hospitals, not anywhere,” said lawyer Mervat Nasri, who is from Syria.

Five weeks after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershock struck southern Turkey, killing 47,000 people, many are still missing, adding mystery to the quake’s full toll and leaving families in an agonizing dilemma. More than 6,000 people have been killed across the border in northern Syria.

Turkish authorities have provided scant information on the number of people missing, making the scale unclear. One indicator is the number of unidentified bodies buried in the cemeteries. Ahmet Hilal, a professor of forensic medicine at Cukurova University in Adana, said that his research in the affected area found that there are currently about 1,470.

Recent interviews with experts, survivors, and officials involved in the recovery effort indicated that there was chaos in the early days of the disaster, as injured people were sent to remote hospitals where they may have died without the knowledge of their relatives, and unidentified bodies were hastily buried because rescue workers had nowhere to store them.

In the weeks that followed, Turkish authorities began using fingerprints, DNA tests and photographs to try to link the unidentified bodies to their relatives.

One branch of this effort is located in a rocky area in Narlica, a town in Hatay province, one of the areas hardest hit by the earthquake. On the last day, police officers and prosecutors worked in metal shipping containers, which were used as earthquake-proof shelters. A group of families came hoping to find traces of their lost loved ones.

The police registered the names of missing relatives and checked a database to see if they had been found elsewhere. Families who found matches received death certificates, photos taken before their relatives were buried, and the names of the cemeteries and the particle numbers where they were buried.

Deadly earthquake in Turkey and Syria An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale on February 6 with its epicenter in Gaziantep, Turkey has become one of the deadliest natural disasters of this century.

Those whose relatives’ names were not in the system watched on a big screen as police scrolled through hundreds of photos of unidentified corpses, many mutilated, hoping to see a face they recognized.

Some families came with nothing. They gave blood for DNA tests that would be checked with samples taken from unidentified cadavers prior to burial.

“I reviewed more than 150 photos. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Sohail Afshi said after leaving the container to smoke a cigarette. “My brother is continuing now.”

He said more than two dozen of Mr. Avci’s relatives were killed in the quake, but he was still searching for his aunt. He had heard a rumor that a woman with her name had been pulled out of the rubble alive, but he had been unable to find her.

Other families received painful confirmations of their loss.

“He was like a mountain, my boy,” exclaimed Makbuli Karadeniz, 62, after recognizing her dead son, Sayit, 35, in the photos.

The February 6 earthquake flattened hundreds of thousands of buildings across southern Turkey, destroying some hospitals, submerging others and creating chaos that made it easier for relatives to miss each other.

She added that after the earthquake, Sakina Nur Gul, 27, passed a snow storm and blocked roads with emergency vehicles to reach her family’s building in the city of Antakya, and finally arrived 19 hours after it collapsed.

Assuming her relatives were buried inside, she said, she waited in the rubble while rescue workers dug up the bodies and survivors. But when they got downstairs on the sixth day, they didn’t find her relatives.

So began a agonizing weeks-long journey to find her mother, father and brother, who were among 28 people missing from the same building.

Believing they could have been pulled out alive soon after the earthquake, she visited hospitals and cemeteries around the area and gave blood in the hope that her DNA would lead to a match.

Early on, she said, she found sprawling swathes of fresh, numbered graves, but there was no one to explain who was buried in them, she said. Some hospitals have refused to show their photos of unknown patients in their intensive care units, citing privacy concerns.

As the search continued, she said, the birthdays of her missing father and brother had passed. Nine days after the earthquake, her father’s bank sent the last automatic mortgage payment for the family’s now-defunct apartment.

She struggled to maintain hope that they were still alive, while feeling unable to grieve until she was sure they were dead.

“How long do we have to wait?” She said.

Previous earthquakes in Turkey have left many people missing.

More than 18,000 people were killed in an earthquake near Istanbul in 1999. To this day, 5,840 people are still officially missing, most of whom are believed to have been buried without identification. They are not included in the death toll.

After last month’s earthquake, about 5,000 unidentified people were buried in the quake zone, said Mr. Helal, a professor of forensic medicine. But he said that in the weeks since, that number has dropped to about 1,470 because many of the buried bodies have been identified through DNA matches and other methods.

Professor Helal said that people could have disappeared in different ways. Exhausted rescue workers buried the bodies before they could be identified, though in most cases they collected photographs, fingerprints, or blood. Others may have been burned by fire in the rubble, he said, making identification difficult.

Professor Helal said other remains could have been moved by mistake when clearing rubble, but this is unlikely because many people waited near the buildings for their relatives to be found.

In the end, Professor Hilal said he expects the number of missing persons to be lower than it was in 1999, when the country could not match the DNA and did not have the fingerprints of as many Turkish citizens and residents.

But for many families, the uncertainty still lingers.

In the days following the earthquake, she said, Rima Balkji and her two sons were rescued from the rubble of their building, and the bodies of her husband and youngest daughter were recovered. But her eldest daughter, Ferial Idriss, 17, was missing, as was a 15-year-old girl from another family who was rescued and taken by ambulance.

In Narlica shipping containers, police found records for her husband and youngest daughter, prepared death certificates and gave her the locations and numbers of their plots in a sprawling new cemetery nearby. She also receives a surprise: the burial site of a niece with the same last name that the family didn’t even know is missing.

But there was no trace of her eldest daughter yet.

“We will wait and see what happens,” said Ms. Baliggi.

Gulsen Harman contributed reporting from Istanbul.

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