SEOUL: Some parents of the mostly teenage victims of South Korea’s ferry disaster are pushing for autopsies that might show their children were alive inside the submerged vessel and only died because the emergency response was so slow.
The confirmed death toll yesterday stood at 171, but 131 were still missing as dive teams searched in near pitch-black conditions for bodies trapped in the ferry’s interior.
More than a week after the
6,825 tonne Sewol capsized and sank with 476 people on board, most of them high school
students, there is still widespread anger among the victims’
families over the pace of the
initial rescue effort.
It took divers working
in difficult and dangerous conditions more than two days to get into the sunken ferry and two more days to retrieve the first bodies.
Many relatives believe some of the victims may have survived for several days in trapped air pockets, but perished in the cold water after no rescue came.
As a result some have asked for autopsies to be performed, to see if it would be possible to determine the precise cause and time of death.
“We have received a number of enquiries about autopsies,” said a member of the forensic team on Jindo island working on identifying the bodies recovered from the disaster site.
“It seems they want some confirmation of the exact cause of death, but it’s only a minority that is asking,” he said.
An official responsible for legal and medical issues at
the emergency situation desk on Jindo said there was nothing to prevent families having an autopsy carried out. — AFP