Noida: For families waiting at the Sector 94 postmortem house on Thursday, the wait was not just for news. It was for certainty — a name, an identification, an answer to whether the person they had been trying to reach since morning was among the nine killed in the bus fire .




The task was especially difficult because the intense blaze had left only skeletal remains of several victims. There were no straightforward visual identifications. Officials said they were matching the list of passengers shared by the bus operator with forensic evidence and other available details to establish who was inside the bus when it caught fire.




By Thursday evening, six of the nine victims had been identified. The remains of those identified were handed over to their families after autopsies, while efforts continued to establish the identities of the remaining three.




Among those identified was Har Sharan Gupta (53) of Orai in Jalaun. He had travelled to Noida to check on his son Om, who was unwell. The two boarded the bus from Sector 37 while returning to their hometown.




According to the family, chaos erupted after passengers realised the bus was on fire. Har Sharan pushed Om towards the exit, helping his son escape. But Har Sharan himself became trapped in the narrow passage and could not get out.




After escaping, Om called his sister, who rushed to the spot from her Noida home. Once the flames were extinguished, charred bodies were recovered from inside the bus in her presence.




At the mortuary, another family waited for confirmation of Saroj (53) and her cousin Mayank (28), both residents of Rath, UP. Saroj had come to Greater Noida for a family function before the two boarded the bus from Sector 37.




Saroj’s sister Nancy, in her 30s, said the relative who had booked their tickets received a call from the bus operator around 3pm. “They informed us about the fire, but did not tell us about the deaths,” she added.




For another family, the search for certainty began at dawn. Sarvodaya Bharadwaj (28) said he started calling his parents around 6am after they failed to reach Mahoba, where they were travelling from Kashmere Gate for his grandmother’s cremation.




“When neither of their phones, nor the conductor’s number, connected, I became worried,” he said. Other passengers told him everyone had been moved to another bus and sent ahead. Still, he remained uneasy.




He contacted police and was told his mother, Rekha, was in hospital. He was asked to come to the police station regarding his father, Devendra Sahay Bharadwaj (60).




At the mortuary, Sarvodaya finally got the answer he had been dreading. “I identified my father through the metal rod in one of his legs,” he said.




A police officer said the bus operator had shared a list of 35 passengers. “According to the list received from the operator, there were 35 people inside the bus. Nine bodies were recovered from inside the bus,” he added.