Spanish morgues are straining to identify migrants
For those who drown trying to reach Europe, the freezers are full
Borja Moreno has less than 48 hours before he bids goodbye to the corpses. As the head of the forensic institute on Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa, his job is to do autopsies on the bodies of migrants who die en route. He has no freezing chamber, so every drowned swimmer must be buried swiftly. Ceuta sees a few dozen per year. Numbers in the Canary Islands, where 73% of migrants to Spain arrive, are much higher: in January some 50 died in one accident. Even islands that have freezers have trouble managing the volume.
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This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “The nameless dead”
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