The body of a woman who drowned during the sinking of the Bulgaria cruise ship and was buried in Belarus by mistake, will be exhumed and reburied in Russia’s Urals.
Galina Batanova, 57, from the Perm Territory in the Urals, was mistakenly identified as 62-year-old Larisa Petukhova from Minsk. Petukhova’s relatives took the body to Minsk in the first days after the tragedy and held funeral services there.
Batanova’s relatives denied that the last unidentified body left in the morgue was that of their relative, and demanded a DNA analysis.
“Specialists of Kazan’s funeral service went to Belarus and the Perm territory to fix the situation, take the bodies of both women to their homeland and help in organizing their burials,” a spokesman for Kazan City Hall said.
The worn-out Bulgaria cruise ship sank during a storm in the Volga River in the Republic of Tatarstan on July 10, killing 122 people. There were over 200 passengers on board the heavily overloaded vessel when it went down.