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Abstract
Ice duty at the Sanglah hospital mortuary in Bali was a daily occurrence for more than a week after two bombs tore through the neighbouring Kuta entertainment district and killed far more victims than the morgue's refrigerators could cope with Each morning at about 9 am, a motley crew of tourist volunteers and employees of a local cleaning firm formed a human chain to shift several hundred 10 kg, metre-long blocks of ice from a lorry to a long row of black body bags laid out in the crematory garden. Under an Interpol treaty, identification has to be confirmed by dental records, fingerprints, or DNA analysis before a body can be handed over. Because visual identification was ruled worthless, some families had to go through the harrowing experience of seeing their loved ones return to the list of the missing. Keeping the Balinese casualties in Bali was a political decision, but international assistance was provided in the form of donations of medicine and the arrival of a team of plastic surgeons from Singapore who operated on many of the burn victims 4 days after the bombing.