The mug shots of the unclaimed dead are pasted on the morgue wall. People with careworn expressions peer at the black and white pictures, hoping yet fearing they will recognize one of the battered faces staring blankly back. Two days after the homecoming of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shattered by Pakistan's worst terrorist attack in years, at least 30 victims of the massive suicide bombing sit in cold storage, waiting for someone to bury them.
Naseem Akhtar, a 60-year old widow, last saw her two sons alive Thursday morning, when they jumped on a bus of flag-waving, jubilant Bhutto supporters, traveling from their village on the Arabian Sea coast outside the city. She caught sight of them again, for the final time, Saturday morning. She identified Mohammed Younus, 25, and Mohammed Yamin, 28, among the bodies wrapped in bloodied white shrouds and stacked on steel shelves inside the morgue of the Edhi Foundation. "Oh God! What happened to me," Akhtar cried afterward, sobbing uncontrollably into her pale blue headscarf. "I'm alone now. What can I do?"
"Benazir should not have come because she knew it was going to happen. She knew that people would try to kill her, but she came to Karachi. Now you see how many people have lost their life," Akhtar said, covering her face. Unable to pay for a funeral, or face the grief of a lonely ceremony, she told Edhi volunteers to give her sons a respectful burial and left, alone, in a motor rickshaw.
Some 122 of the 136 people killed in the midnight bombing -- that authorities suspect was the work of Taliban or al-Qaida-linked militants -- have been brought to the foundation from hospitals across the city to make it easier for relatives to locate missing loved ones. So far, at least 92 have been claimed by their families, but the rest remain to be viewed by the steady trickle of friends or relatives.
The face of each corpse has been photographed, and photocopies of the unclaimed dead are displayed on the exterior wall of the morgue with an instruction in Urdu language: "These bodies are available in the morgue in cold storage for identification."
Anxious people shuffle into the morgue, covering their noses and mouths from the smell of death and chemicals. They pass through an outer room where slabs of ice are stored in a couple of empty coffins, before entering into the windowless, refigerated mortuary lit by bare bulbs.