Closure: In dead files, Gujarat cops find the missing

AHMEDABAD: When a team of Anand police approached a family in Sarsa – about 19km from Anand town – with the photograph of a woman, the family was in for a shock.
The 61-year-old woman, mother of the family head, had been missing since January 2010. The family had lost any hopes of getting her news after over a decade, even as she was legally dead after seven years of remaining missing.
But the body in the picture was definitely hers, with physical description and clothes matching her perfectly even as the facial features were distorted due to the start of decomposition. The body, found near Dakor in Kheda district, was found three months after her missing report.
“It was less than 40 km between the two spots, but it took 11 years for the family and police to get the closure,” says M H Bhati, sub-inspector of the missing persons squad of Anand police.
According to the missing children portal of the government of India, Gujarat still has about 10,000 missing persons, as daily about three to four persons go missing due to reasons ranging from abduction to mental illness. On the other spectrum, there is also a number of unidentified dead whose pictures lie buried in police files.
In a unique experiment, the Anand police has started running matches of pictures of 1,000 unidentified dead found in seven districts over the past decade, with some 500-odd persons missing from Anand since 2007, and have found 11 matches.
Ajit Raijan, SP Anand, said that he had started the pilot project to connect the unclaimed/ unidentified bodies to the missing persons when he was in Surat range a few years ago. “It was there that I realized that with some diligence and attention to details, it’s possible to get the match. Thus, when I came here, we created a database of all unidentified bodies from Anand, Kheda, Ahmedabad rural, Vadodara rural and Bharuch – accounting for about 1,000 persons – for the past decade,” he said.
The district, since 2007, has about 500-odd missing persons.
It’s shock or denial for families:
How do family members feel about the discovery after 5-10 years about the death of their relatives? Rajian said that rather than police procedure, it’s an exercise to give closure to the family. “Till the body is found, a person is almost always alive for the family. Finding the body also helps in settling insurance claims or getting other benefits in some cases,” he said.
“But in most cases, we have get one of three responses – the family is in complete shock but glad that they got the news at least, in complete denial and not wishing to cooperate, and accepting it pragmatically.” He added that in all the cases where the bodies’ DNA samples were saved, they matched it with the family’s. “The issues arise when the missing persons are migrants or have changed their addresses,” said Rajian.
Quick resolution :
In some cases, the gap between report of missing persons and find was a few days – in one of the cases, a 35-year-old man from Kathlal police station area was reported missing on May 14, 2016, and his body found from Anand town on May 18 – whereas in some cases, the gap was of a few years. A 42-year-old man was reported missing from Sojitra in 2015, and his body was found from Jawaharnagar near Vadodara in 2019, after four years. Some of the deaths had taken place in road accidents, whereas in some cases the causes were either natural or not known.