Three more bodies of missing fishermen were recovered by a Coast Guard team off Kozhikode shoreline on Wednesday morning, taking the toll in the Cyclone Ockhi that hit the Kerala coast last week of November to 57.
The unidentified corpses in a highly decomposed state were brought to the Beypore port and shifted to the Kozhikode Government Medical College Hospital for post mortem formalities.
On Tuesday, a team of the Coast Guard and the Marine Enforcement Wing of the State Fisheries Department and the Coastal Police had recovered eight bodies from Kozhikode coast and one body from Tanur in Malappuram district. These bodies have yet to be identified, officials said.
Fishers engaged in fishing had alerted the police that bodies had been floating in the sea on Tuesday morning. Subsequently the search team began operations up to 20 nautical miles in the sea. However it had discontinued the operation at night after recovering eight bodies, but resumed the search at dawn on Wednesday. Most of the recovered bodies have been fishermen who had gone to sea from the southern part of the district and many belonged to Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
At least 32 bodies remained to be identified. As many as 2, 800 fishermen had been rescued in the last fortnight since the Cyclone Ockhi that hit on November 29. However the Latin Catholic Church claimed that over 300 persons are still reported to be missing. However government officials put the figure at 95.
Till now the bodies have been recovered off Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, Kozhikode, Malappuram, Thrissur, Kannur and Kasaragod.
