Tea, Sympathy, but Little News on the Missing

They wanted answers. They got tea and tissues and vague assurances that someone would soon be in touch.

Family members of those missing since terrorist bombs hit London on Thursday spent a third day Saturday filing reports, contacting hospitals and bracing for the inevitable visits to an emergency morgue where the bodies and parts of bodies -- not a single one yet identified -- were being delivered from the blast scenes.

Numb with grief, relatives of the presumed victims worked their way through the expressions of sympathy at a missing persons center where police investigators began collecting information but had yet to dispense any news.

“No one seems to know what is going on,” said a frustrated Billy Yuen, whose wife, Rachelle, a 27-year-old accountant, left for work Thursday morning but hasn’t been seen since.

A native of Mauritius, Yuen is the missing woman’s only kin in Britain. He met with a liaison officer at the newly created tracking center, located in a community sports hall, going over the details of her disappearance.

He even has set up three hotlines in case anyone has information on her whereabouts. But he has received no word.

The family members of Alaoudin Asghar learned that his 20-year-old cousin, Shahara Islam, wasn’t registered at any of the hospitals they had been contacting. But two solemn policewomen who took his information could offer only cups of tea, a counselor if he wanted to talk with someone, and a promise that Islam’s father, the family’s designated contact, would hear from a liaison officer.

Apologies for the delay accompanied explanations that the blast sites are crime scenes and forensic investigation has taken precedence over identification of the victims. Police estimate that the remains of about 25 victims remain trapped in one subway train near King’s Cross Station.

Det. Supt. Jim Dickie, in charge of body recovery for the Metropolitan Police investigation, said it would take weeks to complete identifications and offered official sympathies for the failure to give despairing relatives timely closure.

The police interviewers, mostly female officers, dispensed their doses of sincerity and comfort in gentle tones. But word that identification was still days, if not weeks, away provoked desperation, dejection and even anger from relatives.

“This is absolutely appalling. A Third World country would do a better job of it,” fumed a distraught Gous Ali, who feared his girlfriend, Neetu Jain, had boarded the double-decker bus that was blown up at Tavistock Square.

After Ali and Jain’s sister and father huddled with police interviewers at the tracking center for nearly an hour, they were told a family liaison officer would be in touch, perhaps on Monday.

“We said, ‘This is just not acceptable,’ ” Ali reported after their visit to the Queen Mother Sports Center in central London, where they filled out documents, providing details of Jain’s last known movements for the umpteenth time.

Like other groups of distraught relatives who hoped to receive news, they were steered through a phalanx of security checks into a basketball court that was divided into makeshift cubicles.

The occasional wail of a grief-stricken relative broke an otherwise hushed atmosphere. Social workers stood at the ready, as did two boxes of tissues at each table.

Although many who have searched in vain for missing loved ones expressed frustration, others attributed the delays in identifying victims to the scale of the tragedy.

“We’re all frustrated with how slow it is to identify the victims, whether dead or alive, of this kind of disaster,” said David Golovner, a friend of 37-year-old American Michael Matsushita since they met in third grade in the Bronx, N.Y.

“But we want to make it clear we are not frustrated with the authorities. We don’t feel they are lagging. We’re playing a waiting game, which is awful. But both the [British] family support services and the American Embassy have been very supportive. They’re just challenged by manpower issues.”

Golovner accompanied Matsushita’s parents, Muoi and David, on an overnight flight from New York to assist them in searching for their son, who was en route to a new job Thursday morning. The missing man had moved to London only a month ago to join his fiancee, Rosie Cowan. The two met three years ago while working as tour guides in Vietnam.

Some took the search for the missing into their own hands.

“Have You Seen This Man?” read the fliers bearing a photo of financial manager Jamie Gordon, 30. His fiancee, Yvonne Nash, has papered the area around King’s Cross Station with the notices and inundated the airwaves in her quest for clues.

Friends of Polish accountant Monika Suchocka, 23, put up posters appealing for calls from anyone recognizing the smiling young blond in the picture. A woman who answered the phone number on the flier said she had filed a missing report on her “closest friend,” but declined to discuss the case. “If you’re not a British newspaper, you can’t help me,” she said.

Dickie, the police forensics official, says investigators have been slow to deliver bodies to the mortuary specially designated for bombing victims because the blast sites must be combed for evidence that could lead police to the perpetrators.

“No bodies have been identified as yet because as of [Friday] we only started to receive bodies into the temporary mortuary,” he said. “Autopsies will be starting today. Until that’s done, we won’t have gathered the necessary information to make the identification process.”

None of the 49 confirmed dead have been identified, Dickie said, nor have any next of kin been informed of any details discovered at the bombing scenes, which could confirm their worst fears.

He implored the concerned relatives to be understanding given the daunting conditions under which recovery crews and medical examiners were compelled to work.

“Most of the victims have suffered intensive trauma, and by that I mean there are body parts as well as torsos,” he said describing the remains of 13 victims moved from the site of the bus explosion at Tavistock Square to the mortuary.

Of the bomb scene near the King’s Cross Station, he said, “The environmental conditions are extremely uncomfortable. It’s very confined.” Recovery workers were still removing an unknown number of corpses from an underground tunnel.

With the consent of victims’ families, Dickie said, police would begin collecting “ante-mortem data,” identifying evidence such as fingerprints, dental records and DNA samples taken from tooth and hair brushes.

But Dickie cautioned that it would take weeks to complete identifications of the victims.

Gous, a 32-year-old property developer, said his hopes of his girlfriend being found alive were fading.

“I still have hope that someone made a mistake, that they identified her wrongly and she’s lying unconscious in a hospital somewhere,” he said. “But maybe I’m deluding myself. It doesn’t look very good, does it?”