French heatwave bodies kept in temporary storage

Hundreds of bodies of elderly victims of the French heatwave, unclaimed by their families, are being stored in freezer trucks and in a vegetable cold stores or buried temporarily in paupers' graves.

Hundreds of bodies of elderly victims of the French heatwave, unclaimed by their families, are being stored in freezer trucks and in a vegetable cold stores or buried temporarily in paupers' graves.

In the Paris area alone, the remains of up to 300 people who died in the scorching weather earlier this month have yet to be claimed by relatives, who are believed to be still on holiday.

Nine refrigerator trucks, containing more than 100 unclaimed bodies, have been parked under police guard in a municipal car park in Ivry-Sur-Seine, a southern suburb of the capital, it was revealed yesterday. Others are being kept in a cold store at the Rungis vegetable market and in a morgue normally used for murder victims.

Forty other bodies have already been buried in individual graves in the paupers' section of a cemetery east of Paris. City officials said that the bodies could be exhumed and buried elsewhere, or cremated, when relatives are traced. They denied press reports that some bodies had been placed in a mass grave.

These macabre developments have overshadowed fresh attempts by the French government to calm the controversy over the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people - mostly elderly - during 11 days of searing temperatures up to 100F (38C) from 2 to 13 August. The Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who was booed and whistled when he opened the World Athletics Championships in Paris on Saturday, has cast doubt on the accuracy of this projected death-toll. So has Marc Gentilini, the president of the French Red Cross.

"I can't get reliable figures," M. Raffarin said. "Day after day, I see estimates here and projections there and they produce contradictory numbers."

But the principal association of French funeral directors insists that 10,000 is a conservative estimate of the number of additional deaths - 80 per cent involving people over 75 years old - dealt with by their members in the first three weeks of this month.

Senior medical personnel and health officials have blamed the government for reacting slowly to the first warnings that the extreme heat was killing old people in alarming numbers. Other doctors have blamed the fact that hospitals and retirement homes were under-staffed because so many French people take their holidays in the first half of August. Many other elderly people died in their homes, unable to seek help because their relatives and neighbours were away.

By law, any body unclaimed by family members after six days must be buried in the so-called "common section" of a municipal cemetery, used mostly for the homeless.

The head of the Paris police has ordered an extension of this deadline to 10 days, to allow the town hall more time to trace relatives.

A crisis team of 20 officials has been set up at the Paris Town Hall, which will start work today trying to trace the next of kin of up to 300 elderly people whose bodies have not yet been claimed.

In the meantime, police said, the storage of bodies in freezer trucks "allows the conservation of bodies in conditions of hygiene and decency until the families appear."