On Saturday Gharib Ahmed spent five hours outside the police station in Calais, desperately waiting for news. “It was so cold. There was no answer,” he said. Ahmed was seeking confirmation that his brother-in-law Twana Mamand was one of 27 people who died in the Channel on Wednesday after the flimsy dinghy taking them to the UK sank. “I want to see his body. I have to understand,” Ahmed told the The Guardian.
Relatives of the mostly Iraqi Kurds who perished in the world’s busiest shipping lane spent the weekend in a state of anxiety and confusion. Ahmed said he last heard from his brother-in-law at 3am on Wednesday, around the time Twana set off in darkness from a beach near Dunkirk. After two days of silence, Ahmed travelled with his wife, Kale Mamand – Twana’s sister – from their home in London to northern France, arriving on Friday night.
The bodies of those who died were taken to a basement mortuary inside Calais hospital on the outskirts of the port. According to Ahmed, French detectives told him it would not be possible to definitively identify Twana until 10am on Monday, when the hospital facility reopens. “They have done DNA tests. They explained that sometimes you don’t recognise, if you see a body, that faces can change or be bruised, and that DNA is better,” he said.
Ahmed said he was unwilling for now to accept that Twana was gone. In the meantime, he was spending his hours on the phone, talking to family who live near the town of Ranya in Iraqi Kurdistan, and to Iraqi government officials who have offered to bring Twana’s body home, and to local refugee charities. “I don’t want to make anyone happy or sad until we know for sure,” he said. “There are six to eight families in the same situation.”
Exactly what happened last week is unclear. Twana was part of a group that included his friend Harem Pirot, and another young Kurdish man, Muhammad Shekha.