Nepal has begun mass burials of flood victims before their identities have been confirmed, as officials struggle to cope with the scale of the disaster following last week's flash floods. Of the 794 people confirmed dead, only 20 have so far been identified, while more than 2,400 people remain missing, including 48 British nationals; hospital mortuaries across Kathmandu and the surrounding region are overwhelmed, prompting the government to order burials of unclaimed bodies once DNA samples and photographs have been taken for possible future identification.

Bodies are being found badly decomposed after days submerged in water and mud, some recovered nearly 100 miles from the epicentre of the floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, and others as far away as rivers in India. China has separately reported 15 people missing in Tibet. At Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, whose 50-capacity morgue is already full with roughly 60 bodies, only one victim has been identified and returned to family; among the survivors being treated is a five-year-old girl, Manisha, pulled from rubble after nearly four days when rescuers realised a sound they thought was a cat was in fact a child.