Someone’s body is found at a border. What happens after? - Total Incident Ecology of Deaths and Disappearances on the Balkan Route.

What happens after someone dies or disappears on the Balkan route?

This article is part of Dead and Missing, a four-part series previewing Collective Aid’s forthcoming report, Total Incident Ecology of Deaths and Disappearances on the Balkan Route.

Covering Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, the report examines deaths and disappearances documented between 2020 and July 2026. It follows what comes after: recovery, identification, family notification, burial and the long-term traceability of a grave, including the cases where a person remains unidentified and their family never receives an answer.

Each article explores one part of that chain, offering a first look at the research ahead of the full report’s release on 31 October.

Part one of the Dead and Missing teaser series

A body is found

A body is found by a river, beside a road, in a forest, near a railway line, or at sea. Someone calls the police. A prosecutor may be informed. The body may be moved to a hospital or mortuary. A forensic doctor may examine it. A death certificate may be issued. A municipality may arrange a burial.

From the outside, this can look like a clear chain of responsibility. Someone must take over. Someone must know what to do. But when a person dies while moving across the Balkan route, no single institution is necessarily responsible for carrying the case from the place where the body is found to a point where the person is identified, their relatives are contacted, and their grave can be found again.

The body moves between institutions. Police, prosecutors, forensic services, hospitals, municipal authorities, funeral companies and cemetery staff may each have a role. But a role at one point in the process is not the same as responsibility for the whole process. This is where the question begins: what happens after?

A death is not always a case

When a body is found, the immediate questions are practical. Who is this person? How did they die? Is there evidence of a crime? Does the body need an autopsy? Are there documents, belongings, photographs, fingerprints or samples that could help establish identity later?

But those questions do not always lead to a sustained process. On the Bosnian bank of the Drina, the research found that once a prosecutor has confirmation that someone drowned, the death can be closed as accidental. The reasoning given is that, without evidence of violence, there is no crime and therefore no criminal case to pursue.

That may resolve one legal question: whether a criminal investigation continues. It does not resolve the others. Was the person identified? Was the body linked to anyone reported missing? Were forensic samples preserved? Were personal belongings recorded and retained? Was a family informed? Was the burial site documented in a way that would allow relatives to find it months or years later? A file can close while every one of those questions remains open.

The Drina has long been one route through which people have tried to cross between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Al Jazeera’s reporting on drownings in the river describes the physical danger of the crossing. But a drowning is not only an event at the river. It is also the beginning of an institutional process, and that process can determine whether the person is ever known by name.

The route continues through offices

A person who dies while moving through Europe may not have a local address, a valid passport, a registered doctor, an employer, a lawyer or relatives in the country where they die. General procedures for deaths often assume those connections exist. When they do not, the work of establishing identity and tracing family can fall into the gaps between systems.

The report behind this series examines what happens after deaths and disappearances along the Balkan route: not only recovery and autopsy, but identification, family notification, burial and the longer life of a grave. Across the countries examined, no dedicated framework consistently holds a case from recovery through identification, notification of relatives and a traceable burial record.

That means where a body is found can matter enormously. In Bulgaria, the research found contrasting local practices. In Burgas, bodies of people on the move were reportedly held in morgue storage for prolonged periods. In the Yambol area, unidentified people were reportedly buried within days, with the district prosecutor confirming that rapid burial could be used to free morgue space.

Those differences are not merely administrative. A family may not know immediately that someone has died. An organisation may need time to connect a disappearance with an unidentified body. Documents may need to be collected. DNA reference samples may need to be arranged. If burial takes place within days, there may be little time for any of this to happen.

But keeping a body longer does not automatically make a system more protective either. The period must be used to preserve material, document the person, pursue possible identification and create a route for communication with relatives. The question is not simply how long a body stays in a morgue. It is what the system does with that time.

What must be preserved?

Identification rarely comes from one item alone. A document may be inaccurate, damaged, incomplete or belong to someone else. A name may be recorded differently by police, hospital staff, municipal authorities and a family searching from another country. A phone may contain contact information, but accessing it may require legal authority or technical capacity. Personal belongings can be lost between recovery, examination, storage and burial unless there is a clear record of where they are held.

Forensic information may be essential: fingerprints, dental records, photographs, a physical description, DNA samples, medical observations and a unique case number that connects each part of the record. The point of preserving these materials is not only to solve an identity immediately. It is to keep the possibility of an answer alive.

A person may be identified months or years after death. A relative may only learn that they were missing after they have already been buried. A new DNA comparison may become possible. A family may obtain documents that were not available earlier. A researcher or organisation may later connect a missing-person report to an old record. But this can only happen if the material and the records remain connected.

In North Macedonia, an account published by Legis describes a young man who was buried after 208 days. The case raises another problem: delay can also undermine identification if a body is not properly cared for, documented and linked to an active identification process. The issue is not whether burial should happen early or late. It is whether a body is treated as something to process and move on from, or as a person whose identity may still need to be established.

The difference one person can make

In Greece, InfoMigrants reported on the work of a coroner in Alexandroupoli who documented bodies, collected samples and sought to preserve the possibility of identification for people who died near the Evros border. The International Committee of the Red Cross has also described the risks associated with the Evros crossing.

Such work matters. It shows what can be preserved when identification is treated as part of the response rather than an optional extra. But a person’s chances of being identified should not depend on whether one doctor, municipal worker, volunteer or local organisation has the capacity and commitment to act. A system cannot rely on exceptional individuals to cover a structural gap.

The practical steps after recovery can create an appearance of resolution. A body has been examined. A death is registered. A burial takes place. Each action can be formally complete. But for a family, the central questions may remain unanswered: is this person my relative? Where are they? What happened to them? Was a DNA sample taken? Is there a record of their belongings? Can the grave still be found?

The question remains

A person can be recovered without being identified. They can be registered without being known. They can be buried without anyone being told. These are not questions that arise after the “real” procedure is finished. They are part of what the procedure should make possible.

The problem is especially acute for people who were already difficult for institutions to see while alive: people moving without stable documents, without regular status, without a fixed address and outside systems designed around citizenship and residence.

The next part of this series begins with an uncertain word, whether the person’s identity is ever known, and what happens if it is, or not?

Words by Anna Gruber, Advocacy Manager