GALLE, Sri Lanka (AP) – Balage Shriyani held an old photograph of her seven-year-old daughter, dolled up for a school concert in bangles, makeup and a yellow, ankle-length dress, against a new photograph of a bloated corpse in a sodden blouse, on its back with legs splayed.

“It’s her,” Shriyani sobbed, sinking her head onto her outstretched arm. She had recognised her daughter, Sajini Kaushalya, in a hospital gallery of photographs of unknown victims who died in the Asian tsunami that devastated swathes of the Sri Lankan coast.

Staff at Karapitiya, the main hospital in the southern coastal city of Galle, pasted hundreds of photographs on the walls of a ward yesterday in hopes that relatives of the missing would be able to identify loved ones.

The hospital buried about 1,100 bodies earlier in the week, but was unable to identify 400 of those, deputy director C D Pathirage said. Medics photographed the bodies, took their fingerprints and removed jewellery for possible return to relatives before burying them, but acknowledged that it was unlikely they would be able to identify all.

Many of the colour photographs show bodies distorted by decomposition, their faces swollen beyond recognition, eyeballs and tongues protruding, lips pulled back in permanent grimaces. The flesh of many is blistered and blackened.

“All the facial features had changed,” said hospital doctor S P A Hewage, who hoped families would instead recognise shirts, trousers, belt buckles and tattoos in the photographs. Some of those who died in the tsunamis a week ago were amputees, making identification easier, he said.

The photographs were displayed in a hall that was recently built as a playground for mentally-ill children, and served as a makeshift morgue when truckloads of bodies arrived at the hospital after the disaster. Shriyani studied row after row of gruesome images before identifying the green checkered pattern with red trim of the sleeveless blouse that the girl was wearing on the day of her death.

Shriyani described how she was breast-feeding her 19 day-old baby at her home on the eastern outskirts of Galle when she heard a noise that sounded like a dynamite explosion. She grabbed her two other children and ran out the door, but the waves soon overpowered them.

“I lost my grip on them and we were separated,” she said. While Shriyani later found her boy and revived him by pushing on his stomach to make him cough up the sea water, she did not know what had happened to her girl until she saw the photograph yesterday.

Shriyani’s brother, a 32 year-old motorised rickshaw driver named K G Dilan, lost his 13 year-old daughter in the waters that swept into the city, smashing buses, buildings and people. Her picture, recognisable by a burgundy dress on the body, was also on the wall at Karapitiya hospital.

“My daughter asked me not to go to work that day,” Dilan said. “I went to the owner of my vehicle and gave it back to him. I told my daughter that I was hungry, and she went into the kitchen and started cooking.”

When the waves struck, Dilan said, he grabbed the hand of his daughter, Nimeshika Sewwandi, and they were swept away in the water. He held her hand tightly until a loose sheet of corrugated iron sliced into his shoulder, forcing him to let go.

“Then my daughter floated away in a different direction,” Dilan said. He later found her body and tried in vain to revive her before letting a municipal councillor take the corpse to the hospital.

Dilan knew his daughter was dead, but he went to the hospital and went through the formality of identifying the photograph to ensure that nobody else would claim to recognise her corpse.

He also carried a photo of her when she was nine, her uncle playfully shovelling a spoonful of curried rice into her mouth.

Only a trickle of relatives visited the gallery of photographs yesterday, partly because the hospital was still trying to get the word out to families who were missing loved ones.

“It’s a very difficult process,” Pathirage said. “Sometimes the whole family has died, so there are no relations to identify them.”