JEDDAH: Last November’s floods in Jeddah not only destroyed homes and cars but also washed away dead bodies from cemeteries, including from the cemetery in east Jeddah’s Al-Harazat district.
The bodies ended up in a large lake close by. “A number of bodies with their white burial shrouds ended up in the lake that had formed due to rainwater,” said an eyewitness. Official sources confirmed the reports, adding that the Civil Defense is still using water pumps to empty the lake and find dead bodies.
The floods completely wiped out the cemetery’s southern and western walls, and washed away bodies that had been buried a long time before the floods. On its part, the Jeddah municipality sent maintenance teams to rebuild the destroyed sections of the walls.
“The first bodies to be buried in this cemetery were those of passengers who died when a foreign plane crashed in Jeddah about 30 years ago,” said Hamdan Al-Yami and Hussein ibn Sayyad, two residents of Al-Harazat.
They added that most of the people who die in the area are buried in the cemetery. “This is the first time that the cemetery’s walls fell and that bodies were washed away by floodwaters,” said Al-Yami. Sayyad added that it is difficult to put a number to how many bodies were carried away in the floods.
In the floods’ aftermath, Civil Defense teams worked hard to count the number of bodies that had been disinterred from the cemetery and differentiate between bodies from the graveyard and the bodies of those who died in the floods.
Brig. Muhammad Al-Qarni, spokesman for the Civil Defense, said a number of decomposed bodies were found and handed over to the authorities to ascertain whether they were fresh or from the cemetery. “Three corpses were found to have come from the graveyard. They were wrapped in burial shrouds,” he said. Al-Qarni said 30 people came forward last week to undergo DNA tests to help identify bodies.
He added that 30 people are still missing and that there are still 26 unidentified bodies.
