Brussels Airport on Friday opened a full-service morgue, and company officials said they were responding to a growing demand for more dignified handling of bodies being shipped abroad and brought home for burial.
Sophia Group, a Belgian funeral services company, said its airport morgue was only the second of its kind in Europe. The other is at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.
At most of the world's airports, workers handle caskets much the way they do ordinary luggage and cargo, wheeling them around on forklift trucks.
Brussels Airport handles about 1,200 bodies that arrive or depart each year, and the directors of the new mortuary say it will provide a more respectful backdrop for dealing with remains.
"Transporting a coffin with a forklift like simple baggage is inhumane," said Benoit Vangrunderbeek of the Sophia Group.
The new funeral home is equipped with hearses, two offices, a waiting area and a theater-style room where family members can be with the deceased in quiet and privacy.
It handles the paperwork that comes with moving the dead across borders, has an embalming room and can even reconstruct bodies or do autopsies.
Airports in Paris and Zurich also provide services for bodies in transit but do not have fully operational mortuaries.
At the Brussels facility, families can also organize prayer services. For Muslims, the multi-denominational prayer room faces Mecca.
The need for an airport mortuary has increased in recent years as more people travel and work abroad and immigrant communities in Europe grow, Vangrunderbeek said.
Of the hundreds of bodies handled at Brussels airport each year, 60 percent are flown to Morocco and 25 percent to Turkey - reflecting Belgium's dominant immigrant groups.
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