Corpses washed from cemeteries in France-Italy floods

The task of searching for victims of the French and Italian floods in Alpine villages and on nearby coasts has grown more gruesome as authorities have said corpses from cemeteries have been swept down the mountain by violent rains.

A spokeswoman for France’s Alpes-Maritimes regional administration, badly hit by the storm along with the Italian regions of Liguria and Piedmont, said it was unclear where the bodies had come from but corpses unearthed from cemeteries had washed up on the Italian side.

The cemetery corpses were in such an advanced state of decomposition that they were clearly distinguishable from recent storm victims, the spokeswoman told the Associated Press. Local authorities said cemeteries in the French towns of Saint-Martin-de-Vésubie and Tende were partially washed out by the floods. The mayor of Tende, Jean-Pierre Vassallo, told Le Parisien newspaper that the village cemetery “was cut in two” and bodies were unearthed.

Italian local authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.

A total of 12 deaths have been reported since Friday – four on the French side, eight on the Italian. More than 600 rescuers and others are searching for about 20 people still unaccounted for.

Police are going door to door to check on people reported as missing in hamlets where roads, electricity, communications and water supplies were cut off by the storm.

Seven black Canadian wolves were also missing after a wildlife park north of the southern French Riviera city of Nice was left in rubble after the floods.

The French Office for Biodiversity (OFB) has warned that the wolves may starve to death if not found soon as they are used to being fed. Two agents and a veterinary surgeon are searching the area by helicopter after sightings of some of the wolves were reported near the park.

“The priority is to find them, and capture them with the help of a dart gun,” the OFB regional director, Eric Hansen, told Agence France-Presse.

Black Canadian wolves are a large subspecies of grey wolves, weighing about 80kg.

The body of one of the park’s three polar wolves was found after its enclosure was swept away by the floods. The other two “are probably dead, too”, Hansen said.

A third enclosure with three central European grey wolves was spared, and would become the Canadian wolves’ temporary home once they were found, he said.