Through a narrow doorway leading to the dead, the grim routine of cataloguing the slain from Sri Lanka’s latest suicide bombing ground on late into the night.
Dazed young sailors, some smelling of alcohol, crowded round the doorway in a building set apart at one end of the hospital grounds in Dambulla.
Corpses, or pieces of corpses were dragged into the hall in bloodied sheets and tied up in black plastic. There, a handful of men in camouflage uniforms cross-checked lists of names with tattered identity papers.
Then the bodies were carried out of the makeshift morgue and set down in a yard. Bureaucratic routine had taken over from the madness of earlier hours.
At least 103 people, mostly Sri Lankan sailors who were either heading off on leave or returning to duty, were killed when suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bombers detonated an explosive-filled truck near their buses on Monday.
Dambulla hospital was immediately flooded with dead and wounded.
”We had chaos,” said Kapila de Alwis, the hospital’s medical superintendent as another late meeting broke up, leaving a table full of empty water bottles and scraps of paper with figures scribbled on them.
”At round 1.40pm the dead and patients started coming in,” he said.
He ticked off the numbers learned by heart: 87 bodies, 112 patients, 98 of them transferred to other hospitals leaving 14 in his wards, but only one in critical condition.
”It was the first time for something like this here,” he said, but quickly added: ”Our staff were marvelous. Our people’s commitment in a disaster is enormous.”
After the earlier frenzy, sombre calm had descended over the hospital, but reminders of the day’s carnage remained littered across the grounds.
Gurneys clogged breezeways. Bloodied mattresses and foam pads lay abandoned in the yards or had been thrown into messy piles in far corners. Waste bins overflowed with stained rags or bandages and latex gloves lay discarded in the dirt.
A friend replaced one young sailor’s sweat-soaked face mask with a fresh one. Another of the injured, who looked barely out of his teens, repeatedly glanced down at his trembling hands, encased in bloody gloves.
Others still crowded the doorway, a sweating anxious pack offering strips of cloth and winding sheets to bind the bodies.
Then a police officer arrived to order the photographers away, warning them the morale of Sri Lanka’s military would sink to new lows if they saw pictures of their dead comrades published.
Meanwhile two large trucks had been backed up to the building.
Their doors swung open to receive the grim plastic-wrapped bundles that were piling up in the yards. – Sapa-AFP