Nepal DNA labs process 3,685 samples to identify flood victims

Rajesh Ram clutched a photograph of his missing son as he spoke to AFP. The young man in the picture was Suroj Kumar, a garage mechanic from Betrawati. The floods had swamped the town. Ram was fifty-three. He had gone looking for his son afterward and had come back empty-handed.

“I searched for him everywhere, but I could not find his body,” he said.

Without remains to claim, he was pinning his hopes on DNA testing, one father still waiting for an answer about his son.

On the banks of the Trishuli River in Nuwakot district, a search-and-rescue team member and a sniffer dog were still combing the ground on September 30, 2026. More than a month had passed since the glacial and rock collapse on the Nepal-China border, on August 26, that sent freezing water and debris through the valleys. Bodies had been carried far downstream. The search had not ended.

Nepali disaster authorities had recovered 1,454 bodies. Around a third of those were only partial remains. Just 112 had been identified and returned to their families. A further 5,285 people were still missing in Nepal, including hundreds of foreigners. In China, state media put the toll at 43 dead and 519 missing. The combined figure stood near 1,500 dead and 5,800 missing. Most of the recovered dead still had no names.

At Kathmandu’s two forensic laboratories, the National Forensic Science Laboratory and the Nepal Police Central Forensic Science Laboratory, experts were profiling samples and building a database on a scale neither facility had handled before. A total of 3,685 forensic samples were undergoing DNA testing. More than 1,300 of them had been collected from recovered bodies.

Mukul Pradhan, chief scientific officer at the National Forensic Science Laboratory, set the load against an ordinary year. “In a year we would analyse 1,000–1,500 samples, often in case of paternity or crime scenes,” he said. “We are now processing thousands of samples.” That was the caseload the staff and instruments were built around. The flood had replaced it with thousands of samples in process at the same time.

Blood samples were easier to profile. Material taken from teeth or bone could take several days. A DNA profile is a reading of the variable repeating sequences in a person’s genetic material, distinctive enough that one sample can be set beside another and compared. In ordinary disaster victim identification the comparison stays narrow: remains found in a defined place are checked against a limited pool of possible relatives.

Some of the bodies recovered after this flood had been carried far downstream, further complicating the task, said Nirajan Thapa, chief of the biology section at the National Forensic Science Laboratory. “In an earthquake or an accident, people are recovered in a specific area, so we work in a closed scenario — the body's DNA has to be compared to a limited number of samples,” he said. “But that scale has now become very large.”

A profile drawn from remains was not enough on its own. “Just by extracting a DNA profile is not enough to identify someone,” Thapa said. “We have to extract a DNA profile from their relatives and then compare.” Both the unidentified remains and samples from thousands of relatives had to be processed before any match could exist. Without the kin profiles in the database, each reading from the dead was only half a name.

More than 1,200 bodies had been buried, each numbered and tagged so it could be brought back up if a DNA match later pointed to a name. The database was the only map that could call any of them home.

“A large number of people are missing, and the bodies that have been found they are difficult to identify,” said Nepali police spokesman Abi Narayan Kafle. “We understand the pain people are in, and our teams are working diligently.”

Support had arrived from outside. Teams came from India, China and South Korea. Fingerprint experts from the United States and Singapore joined the work. The matching itself stayed with Nepal. Eugene Wang, commander of the Singapore Police Force’s disaster victim identification team in the country, put the rule plainly: “As (Nepal is) the site of the disaster, international protocol states that Nepal must be the one to match the DNAs of missing foreigners as well.” Profiles from abroad still had to land in the same Nepali comparison.

With the support teams at work, Thapa said matching could begin within a few weeks. Even so, experts warned that matching bodies to families could still take weeks, given the volume of profiles under analysis and the fragmented remains. Finished readings had to come first from the samples already in the laboratories, then be set against the relative samples before any name could return. Until the results arrived, the families behind the samples remained in limbo. Some had already held symbolic cremation funerals for the missing.

Among those still without remains was Rajesh Ram. “I am waiting if I can find any remains of my son,” he said.