‘Little hope of naming tsunami victims’
Watches, chunky gold necklaces with Buddhist amulets, an Egyptian souvenir coin purse, and a wad of $1,800 (€1,475) in cash were pulled from tattered cardboard boxes and police evidence bags stashed in the container that has not been opened since 2011.
The three meter by 12 meter container was passed to various Thai police agencies after the 2004 disaster that killed at least 226,000 people in 14 countries.
It was handed over to Takua Pa district police in southern Thailand in 2011.
However, the Takua Pa police never looked inside until recently when they opened the container ahead of the 10-year anniversary of the December 26 tsunami when the items can, by official regulation, be put up for auction.
They initially believed the container held the belongings of unidentified victims, but found some items were identification cards and credit cards and could be claimed by relatives.
“I’m a bit surprised by the large number of valuables,” Lieutenant Colonel Voravit Yamaree from Takua Pa district. “I think back then everyone was so busy focusing on identifying the corpses they may have forgotten about this.”
The tsunami left 5,395 dead and 2,932 missing in Thailand, including about 2,000 foreign tourists, when a wall of water several meters high ripped through resorts and fishing villages on the Andaman Sea coast in southern Thailand.
In the aftermath of the tsunami, forensics experts from 39 countries convened in Phang Nga, where about 80% of the victims in Thailand perished, to identify the bodies.
The Thai Tsunami Victim Identification unit was considered one of the largest and most successful projects of its kind, putting names and faces to the thousands of tourists, Thais and migrant workers who were killed in the St Stephen’s Day disaster.
However, 10 years after the one of the most devastating humanitarian disasters in recorded history, about 400 unclaimed bodies — 369 of them still unidentified — rest in metal coffins, marked with coded numbers.
In the past four years, just 24 bodies have been claimed, all but one of them Thai nationals, according to various reports.
In Ban Nam Khem, a sleepy fishing village on the north end of Phang Nga, the tsunami left 661 dead and 765 missing.
The unidentified and unclaimed bodies are all in a cemetery in Bang Maruan village, just south of Takua Pa.
