The Civil Defense has appealed to families of missing persons to come forward for DNA testing as the work of authorities responsible for identifying victims of the Jeddah floods is complicated by the possible presence of graveyard bodies and administrative inconsistencies. Head of the Civil Defense Media Center Mohammed Al-Qarni said that a report from Health Affairs showed that some victims' bodies had been returned to their families by hospitals without the knowledge of Civil Defense. “One person said he had received the body of a relative from a hospital but that the deceased's name had not been recorded on the list of victims, prompting the Civil Defense to look into the possibility that similar cases may have occurred,” Al-Qarni said. Precise recordings are being further complicated by bodies which, Al-Qarni said, may have originated from Al-Harazat Cemetery where floods are thought to have brought graveyard corpses to the surface. Al-Qarni revealed that a foreign expert had been drafted in along with high-tech equipment to help in operations. A registry was also made of all graveyard sites and morgues in the area, and 11 teams of 29 Civil Defense officials and dozens of members of the armed forces had been dispatched to numerous sites. Over 100 scuba divers were also conducting searches at wells and pools in affected areas. “We will be focusing our efforts primarily on the districts of Al-Harazat and Al-Jami'a where there's a chance that bodies remain buried,” Al-Qarni said. Al-Qarni noted one instance where the identification of a body was disputed between two families, and DNA was used to resolve the issue.
