Friday 31 August 2012

Chile Admits Irregularities in Identifying Disappeared Persons

Santiago, Chile - Chilean authorities admitted today the persistence of irregularities in the identification of bodies of the disappeared, with the resulting trauma for relatives, victims of the genocide committed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

These irregularities will mean that 14 families will have to return the remains of those they thought were their beloved ones, as already happened in 2006, according to www.biobiochile.cl.

The source refers to a meeting held yesterday by minister of the Appeals Court of Santiago, Alejandro Solis, with families of the detained-disappeared.

During the meeting, these relatives received information about the proceeding followed to identify 124 bodies that had been buried in the Patio 29th of the General Cemetery, in 1991.

Patricio Bustos, head of the Legal Medical Service, attended the meeting, where it was informed that 51 of the victims had been identified.

Not all those results were positive. "We told 24 families that the remains they had in fact belonged to their relatives, but we had to tell the others that unfortunately mistakes were made in their identification," admitted Solis.

He apologized to the families and lamented the drama brought by this denial, while Bustos announced that in order to identify other bodies we will need to discover bodies belonging to relatives of the victims to obtain bone samples and see whether they match.

"The minister summons the families and informs them immediately to try not to increase a nearly 40 year-long anguish," said Bustos.

The Pinochet regime left some 40,000 victims, including more than 3,000 people killed.

The probe into the illegal burials in Patio 29th started on July 16, 1991, in the wake of a denunciation filed by the Vicaria de la Solidaridad.

Friday 31 August 2012

http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=540243&Itemid=1

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Peru Identifies Civil War Victims

LIMA - Of the 69,000 people killed during the 1980-2000 armed conflict in Peru, at least 16,000 were buried in secret unmarked graves. So far, only 2,064 of these bodies have been recovered, and just 50 percent have been identified, according to a new report.

“The exhumation process is slow and disorderly, and moreover it is not a priority for the authorities, even though no democracy can grow strong without reconciling with its past and without recovering its dead,” historian Carola Falconí, executive director of the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (COMISEDH), told IPS.

For example, the forensic medicine institute (IML), which is in charge of the exhumations and answers to the attorney general’s office, does not have a national plan for forensic anthropological investigations to recover the remains of the victims of the civil war between government forces and the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

Nor do the authorities have up-to-date records on the areas where bodies were buried, often in mass graves, which would give a complete picture of what still needs to be done, says the book “Los muertos de Ayacucho. Violencia y sitios de entierro clandestinos” (The Dead of Ayacucho: Violence and Clandestine Burial Sites), presented by COMISEDH on Tuesday Aug. 28.

IML officials estimate that there are 15,731 victims – acknowledged to be an underestimate – of the conflict buried at more than 4,000 sites around the country documented by the CVR up to 2003.

But the IML was only able to find 2,064 bodies between 2002 and 2011, which means that at this rate, it would take eight decades to exhume the rest of the bodies, and much more time to identify them and turn the remains over to the victims’ families, says the book, whose journalistic investigation was carried out by this reporter.

The government inaction is especially notorious in the southern department or region of Ayacucho, which suffered the highest number of victims during the armed conflict. Official figures indicate that in the last 10 years, the remains of 1,196 of the 8,660 victims buried there – a conservative estimate – have been exhumed.

COMISEDH reveals in its book that in Ayacucho there are another 1,818 burial sites, besides the 2,234 reported by the CVR in 2003.

The new figure emerges from the updating of the records carried out by COMISEDH from 2004 to 2009, after the CVR stopped operating.

The figure has since been updated, to a total of 6,462 secret unmarked graves.

To locate the sites, a team of COMISEDH researchers headed by Falconí interviewed thousands of family members of victims, survivors and witnesses in some 100 villages and towns of Ayacucho. Several of the experts had been in charge of putting together the original CVR list in that region.

Falconí said that in late September, she would give the updated list to the office of the public prosecutor and the ombudsman’s office, so it could be used as “a tool to draw up a plan for forensic anthropological investigations and an orderly, efficient process of exhumation, in accordance with international standards.”

In its 2003 report, the CVR recommended that the government craft a national plan for forensic anthropological investigations, to make it possible to recover and identify the remains of victims and hand them over to the families, in an efficient and planned manner, especially necessary given the complexity of the events in question and the number of years that have passed.

“It’s not the same thing to exhume the body of someone who died recently as those of people who were murdered over two decades ago,” said Falconí.

Exhuming bodies implies stirring up past crimes. Forensic anthropological investigations make it possible to identify the cause of death, and provide clues as to who may have been responsible, as a result of analysing the bones and scraps of clothing and other belongings and carrying out a reconstruction of events.

The head of the IML, Gino Dávila, told IPS that his team has an annual schedule for exhumations, but that a document with a medium- to long-term scope such as the one called for by the CVR would be difficult to come up with because the government forensic experts work on the basis of requests by the prosecutors who are investigating the civil war-era human rights violations.

“For this year, we have programmed some 400 exhumations, to try to speed things up and gain time. If we assessed what would be needed to complete the work (recover the remains of all of the victims), a great deal of funds would be needed,” Dávila said.

The specialised IML forensic team has a budget of about 600,000 dollars a year – 80 percent less than what Dávila had requested from the attorney general’s office for the purpose of recovering and identifying the remains of victims, including DNA testing.

Only 50 percent of the bodies exhumed have been identified so far. The rest are still pending DNA tests. And in some cases, it is impossible to determine the identity of the victim due to the poor state of the remains, the absence of family members to provide blood samples to match with DNA, or the lack of materials to carry out the required technical process.

This high proportion of unidentified bodies indicates inadequate investigation prior to the exhumation, according to experts at the only two specialised civil society institutions, the Andean Centre for Forensic Anthropology Research (CENIA) and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF).

There are family members who have been waiting for results of DNA tests for seven years, when they gave blood samples. The civil society experts say that at the very least, grieving relatives should be informed when a match is made and a body is identified.

In response to the indifference and ignorance of much of society and the lack of political will on the part of the authorities, COMISEDH proposed a plan of forensic anthropological investigations for Ayacucho, in order to recover the victims in a more efficient manner, Falconí said.

The head of the human rights investigation team in the ombudsman’s office, César Cárdenas, said that “Allowing them to stay there (in the ground) is like recognising that Sendero Luminoso, which started the armed struggle, was right. And we know that this is not true.”

Friday 31 August 2012

http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/peru-identifies-civil-war-victims-at-snails-pace/

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Thursday 30 August 2012

Indian military helicopters collide in mid-air, nine killed

Two military helicopters collided in mid-air during a training sortie over the western Indian state of Gujarat on Tuesday, killing nine air force personnel, the government has said.

Television pictures showed skeletal, charred remains of the Russian-made MI-17 multi-utility helicopters in what seemed like a sparsely populated area. The wreckage was surrounded by police, firefighters and military officials.

Officials quoted by the media said the crash site was a military area near the Jamnagar airbase in Gujarat, a state bordering Pakistan. No casualties or loss of property on the ground was reported.

The country's military has been plagued by often fatal accidents due to obsolete hardware. More than half of the 872 MiG fighters India bought from Moscow since the early 1960s have crashed.

India plans to spend about $100bn over the next 10 years to upgrade largely Soviet-era military equipment.

Thursday 30 august 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/30/indian-military-helicopters-collide?newsfeed=true

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Japan estimates monster quake could kill 320,000

Japan's government on Wednesday unveiled a worst case disaster scenario that warned a monster earthquake in the Pacific Ocean could kill over 320,000 people, dwarfing last year's quake-tsunami disaster.

Tokyo's casualty toll estimate was based on a catastrophic scenario in which a powerful undersea quake of about 9.0 magnitude sparked a giant tsunami that swamps Japan's coastline south of Tokyo The Cabinet Office's hypothetical disaster would see the quake strike at nighttime during the winter with strong winds helping unleash waves that reach 34-metre (110 feet), sweeping many victims away as they slept.

Many of the estimated 323,000 victims would be drowned by the tsunami, crushed under falling objects or in fires sparked by the disaster, it said.

On March 11 last year, a 9.0 magnitude quake struck seismically-active Japan in the early afternoon, triggering tsunami waves that reached 20 metres.

About 19,000 were killed or remain missing while the tsunami slammed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, sending reactors into meltdown and sparking the worst atomic crisis in a generation. "As long as we live in Japan, we cannot deny the possibility of a huge earthquake and tsunami," Masaharu Nakagawa, state minister for disaster management, told reporters Wednesday.

The report was designed to paint a worst-case scenario and help officials boost their disaster preparedness.

An estimate in 2003 assumed casualties of about 25,000 people, but that scenario envisioned a less powerful 8.4 magnitude quake striking a smaller area.

The deadliest quake in Japanese history struck the central Kanto region in 1923, killing at least 100,000 people.

Thursday 30 August 2012

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-japan-monster-quake.html#jCp

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Navy recovers 10 more bodies off Libyan coast

The Navy recovered 10 more bodies on Wednesday evening, who were victims of a boat that sank while transporting 40 illegal immigrants off the coast of Libya on Sunday evening.

“The bodies were completely decomposed,” said Health Ministry Undersecretary Mahmoud Zahran. “Only three bodies were identified from the ID cards that were found.”

The bodies were sent to the morgue of the Barrany Central Hospital. The morgue at Salloum Hospital.

Seventeen bodies have been recovered from the accident site so far.

Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm

Thursday 30 August 2012

http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/navy-recovers-10-more-bodies-libyan-coast

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Nine passengers dead in DG Khan road mishap

DERA GHAZI KHAN - Nine passengers died while 70 others received injuries when two coaches collided at Indus Highway near Kala Town on late Tuesday night.

The Local people later joined the Rescue 1122 personnel dragged out the bodies and the injured passengers from both the buses which were bound for Karachi and coming from Swat. The injured said that both the buses stopped at a hotel for dinner and had just moved when met the fatal accident.

Most of the passengers were going back to their work station after celebrating Eid at their native towns. As per police officials, the two coaches (LZ 1475 and LRT 1467) collided at sharp turn while making an attempt to overtake when an oil tanker came from the opposite side at the highway in the town near some 40 km from here towards North. The deceased were identified as Mohammad Iqbal, the driver of a coach, Mohammad Sadiq, Shazia Bibi, Saddam Hussain, Ali Zai, Gull Tahir and Sajid Hussain while the two dead bodies were yet to be identified.

The injured were shifted to the District Headquarters Hospital while the minor injured were rushed to a nearby rural health centre.

Thursday 30 August 2012

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/national/30-Aug-2012/nine-passengers-dead-in-dg-khan-road-mishap

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Amnesty Urges Balkans to Investigate War Missing

Amnesty International is calling on Balkan governments to investigate the fate of some 14,000 people who are still unaccounted for since the region's conflicts in the 1990s.

This is nearly half the total of 34,700 people reported missing between 1991 and 2001 when a series of conflicts tore apart the former Yugoslavia.

The group said Wednesday the missing are a daily source of pain for relatives wanting to learn the fate of their loved ones.

"The lack of investigations and prosecutions of enforced disappearances and abductions remains a serious concern throughout the Balkans," Amnesty official Jezerca Tigani said on the International Day of the Disappeared on Thursday.

"The major obstacle to tackling impunity and bringing the perpetrators to justice is a persistent lack of political will" in Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo, she stressed.

While some of the main war crimes perpetrators have been tried by the UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, that tribunal is nearing the end of its mandate, Amnesty warned.

"Domestic courts are slow to abide by their responsibility to seek out, identify, and prosecute the remaining perpetrators," it said.

Amnesty stressed that the families of the victims, who come from all ethnic groups and walks of life, must get access to justice and reparations for their loss.

"Their families have the right to know the truth about the circumstances of the forced disappearance, the process and the result of the investigation and the fate of the disappeared person," Tigani said.

The families of the victims, "do not know if they will ever return, so they cannot mourn and adjust to the loss," according to an Amnesty report issued on Thursday.

It quotes the mother of Albion Kumnova, a Kosovo Albanian who disappeared during the 1998-99 conflict between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian security forces. His body is believed to have been transported to Serbia and buried there.

"If I could know where my son Albion is, and if I could bury him and put a flower on his grave I would be in a better place," Nesrete Kumnova told Amnesty.

Besides calling on the Balkan governments to "demonstrate a clear commitment ... to end impunity for enforced disappearances and abductions" Amnesty also urged the European Commission to pressure them on the subject during the accession process of countries that want to join the European Union.

Croatia is set to enter the EU in 2013, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro are all candidate members, while Bosnia and Kosovo also want to join the 27-member bloc sometime in the future.

In July 2011 some 500,000 people in the region signed a joint petition of more than 1,500 NGOs from all over the former Yugoslavia asking for an independent regional commission to draw up a list of all the victims of the wars and try to clarify the fate of the people still listed as missing.

It is estimated that at least 130,000 people were killed in the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo. Most of them -- some 100,000 -- died during Bosnia's 1992-1995 conflict.

Thursday 30 August 2012

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/Amnesty-warns-14000-are-still-missing-after-Balkans-wars/articleshow/15977830.cms

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Death toll climbs to 19 in SW China mine explosion

CHENGDU, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) -- The death toll in a gas explosion that occurred Wednesday afternoon in a coal mine in southwest China's Sichuan province has climbed to 19, rescuers said Thursday morning.

A total of 107 miners have been rescued, although 28 remain missing, the local rescue headquarters said.

Chinese state television said rescue teams had retrieved the bodies of 19 miners who died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Another three people died in hospital.

A total of 154 miners were working underground at the Xiaojiawan Coal Mine in the city of Panzhihua when the blast occurred around 6 p.m. Wednesday.

The injured have been taken to local hospitals, the headquarters said.

Professional rescue teams from other coal mines in Sichuan have been sent to the accident site.

The coal mine is owned by Zhengjin Industry and Trade Co., Ltd.

The owner of the mine is being questioned by police.

China's mines are the deadliest in the world because of lax enforcement of safety standards and a rush to feed demand from a robust economy. But the death toll from accidents has been falling, government statistics show.

The government work safety watchdog said that 1,973 miners were killed in coal mine accidents last year, according to state media. In 2010, 2,433 people were killed, down from a toll of 2,631 the previous year.

Thursday 30 August 2012

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-08/30/c_131817265.htm

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Wednesday 29 August 2012

Authorities ID 5 victims of Tahoe plane crash

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — Authorities say the five victims of a single-engine plane crash near South Lake Tahoe include a Fresno trucking company owner and a 6-year-old girl.

El Dorado County sheriff's officials said Tuesday that dental records helped identify the two couples and the child killed in the late Saturday crash.

They were 60-year-old Harold Cardwell, 41-year-old Kin Cardwell, 43-year-old Francisco De La Mora, 39-year-old Lorena De La Mora and 6-year-old Esmeralda De La Mora. All were from Fresno.

The plane was registered to trucking firm owner Francisco De La Mora.

A company employee said De La Mora's wife and daughter flew to South Lake Tahoe with him.

Witnesses say the plane made a turn and crashed soon after takeoff.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local/authorities-id-5-victims-tahoe-plane-crash/nRMcs/

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26 victims identified in fatal bus accident

YAN'AN - The identity of 26 people, who were killed in a bus-tanker collision in Northwest China's Shaanxi province on Sunday, have been confirmed, the local government said Tuesday.

DNA testing has been completed for all of the crash victims and experts are checking the results to ensure their accuracy, the Yan'an municipal government said.

The accident happened in Yan'an at around 2 a.m. Sunday, when a double-decker sleeper bus crashed into a methanol-loaded tanker and caught fire on the Baotou-Maoming expressway.

The 39-seat bus was full at the time of the crash, with three survivors sent to local hospitals for treatment. Two of the survivors, who were seriously injured, are currently in stable condition. Another slightly-injured passenger is receiving further treatment.

A compensation plan for the victims' relatives has been drafted and the compensation will be issued soon, the local government said.

The State Council has sent an investigation team to Yan'an to look into the accident, said officials with the State Administration of Work Safety.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-08/28/content_15713758.htm

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11 die in Haiti mudslides, rains

A storm set off mudslides and flooding that killed at least 11 people in impoverished Haiti, officials said yesterday.

Rains engulfed the capital for several hours Monday night, turning hilly streets into rivers and sweeping debris down denuded hillsides of Haiti's capital.

Motorists abandoned their cars. Women could be heard screaming for help as water pounded the supposedly temporary settlements that arose in Port-au-Prince, after last year's powerful earthquake.

Marie Alta Jean-Baptiste, director of Haiti's Civil Protection Department, told Radio Galaxie that 11 people drowned or died in mudslides. All but one of the deaths happened in the Port-au-Prince area.

Officials say they fear the hurricane season, which officially began last week, could exacerbate a cholera outbreak that already has killed 5,000 people. Haiti's newly elected President Michel Martelly took to national television just before midnight to calm the nation as the storm was still passing over the city. "This message is to tell the population that I'm with you," the President said.

Martelly said the seaside slum of Cite Soleil flooded and walls toppled in the hills above Port-au-Prince. He ordered government construction workers to show up to work early Tuesday. Debris and mud clogged major thoroughfares Tuesday, causing traffic jams throughout the capital.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

http://www.momentng.com/en/news/2852/11-die-in-haiti-mudslides-rai.html

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18 bodies recovered as Cameroon dam floods 250 Nigerian villages

UPI – A massive release of water from a dam in Cameroon submerged 250 villages in neighboring Nigeria and killed an unknown number of people.

Eighteen bodies were recovered Monday from the Benue River in the Nigerian state of Adamawa, The Guardian reported.

Kobis T. Ari, secretary to the state government, told journalists Adamawa officials received a letter from the Cameroon government on Friday advising that water would be released from the Lado Dam, at the upper reaches of the Benue River.

Ari said the release was done before villagers could be told to leave flood-prone areas.

Cameroon regularly releases water from the dam.

Ari said Cameroon should compensate the victims of the flooding and enter an agreement with its neighbor on how to avoid the “yearly disaster.”

He said the flooding was the worst since 1958.

Schools, hospitals and government offices also were submerged.

Medical workers have been dispatched to the area to help prevent an outbreak of disease, he added.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

http://www.pilotafrica.com/2012/08/28/18-bodies-recovered-as-cameroon-dam-floods-250-nigerian-villages/

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Flash floods: 18 feared dead as bus swept away in AJK

AJK / MIRPUR: At least 18 people, including eight women, are feared dead, while nine others were injured, after a passenger bus was swept away in a flash flood in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) on Tuesday.

“Nine bodies have so far been recovered, while nine people have been rescued, from the sharp currents of Nullah Sair in the mountainous Sudhanoti district of AJK”, said the district police chief Sajaad Hussain.

“The bus, with at least 27 passengers on board, was on its way from Palandri town to Anjaal Kot town when it was swept away in the seasonal nullah which had overflowed its banks,” said Shoukat Tabassam, a local resident and an eyewitness.

Flash floods have become more frequent following a spell of heavy late monsoon rains in the northern areas.

“Nine people, including three women and a child, were rescued and rushed to district hospital Palandri,” Tabassam said, adding their condition is stated to be out of danger.

The deceased, whose bodies have been recovered, are all residents of Anjaal Kot town.

Search for the remaining passengers continued till the filing of this report. The wreckage of the private passenger bus could not be recovered from the nullah till late Tuesday night.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

http://tribune.com.pk/story/427650/flash-floods-18-feared-dead-as-bus-swept-away-in-ajk/

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DNA advances help identify dead buried in NYC potter's field; 54 bodies exhumed

NEW YORK, N.Y. - On a wind-swept island off New York City, the remains of 850,000 people rest in pine boxes in a grid of covered trenches — but many are not resting in peace.

They are the unidentified or unclaimed dead who have been found around the largest U.S. city — often with little hope of a loved one ever knowing their fate. Now, with advances in DNA technology and anthropology and with new federal funding, the city medical examiner's office has exhumed dozens of the bodies in a new push to identify several decades' worth.

It's how Ben Maurer's family finally learned that the 17-year-old had jumped to his death from a Manhattan building on June 25, 2002.

His mother, Germaine, submitted his DNA to the medical examiner in 2009, when the first phase of the project began. The DNA was entered into a public database containing information on thousands of cases of missing and unidentified people — and matched a John Doe buried in the potter's field on 101-acre (41-hectare) Hart Island on Long Island Sound.

He was given a proper funeral near the family's home in Piscataway, New Jersey, shortly after his remains were returned to them in 2009.

"It meant everything," said Jared Maurer, Ben's 28-year-old brother. "It finally gave us closure to what had happened to Ben."

Jared Maurer said he frequently visits his brother's gravesite. "I tell him I miss him, I tell him I love him," he said.

At any given time, there are 40,000 active missing and unidentified person cases in the United States. New York State accounts for 25 per cent of those cases, most of them in New York City.

The identities of some of the bodies in the potter's field are known, but their families are too poor to have them buried elsewhere.

DNA samples weren't regularly taken from all bodies until about 2006, so the only way to identify many bodies is to exhume them, once DNA samples can be matched up with a description of a corpse, like in Maurer's case.

Fifty-four bodies for which the medical examiner's office had no DNA samples have been disinterred from Hart Island. The exhumation, performed by city inmates, is part of a larger effort to gather data on the unknowns. So far, 50 have been identified, including some who were exhumed.

To date, the scientists have gathered data on more than 1,200 unidentified bodies and entered it into Namus, the public database that is run by the National Institute of Justice — the research arm of the Department of Justice — that helped identify Maurer.

DNA technology developed for the need to identify remains from the Sept. 11 attacks and other disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, has contributed to a national push in recent years to identify unclaimed remains, said Benjamin Figura, a forensic anthropologist and director of identification at the medical examiner's office.

Bodies in advanced states of decomposition get an anthropological workup; the scientists determine age, ancestry, sex and height and identify any other unique features that could be helpful in identification such as tattoos, scars and prior surgeries.

"What we're building is a biological profile. ... If we can say this is a 17-to 25-year-old male, we can narrow down the pool of potential matches," said Bradley Adams, who heads the team.

Germaine Maurer called the New York City morgue to search for her son the day after he disappeared, but because he had dark features and looked older, he was labeled as a male Hispanic in his 20s, rather than a 17-year-old white male.

She counts herself lucky.

"There are many families out there missing loved ones who never know what has happened," she said. "We were very fortunate. We found out all the details."

Wednesday 29 august 2012

http://www.canada.com/news/world/advances+help+identify+dead+buried+potters+field+bodies+exhumed/7159914/story.html

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Crash victims’ identification process continues

The Indonesian disaster victim identification (DVI) team has found it difficult to identify the remains of the victims of last week’s Cessna Piper Navayo Chiftain PA31 crash in East Kalimantan due to their condition.

Budi, of the Indonesia DVI, said that the remains that were severely damaged and too difficult to identify at the AW Syahranie hospital in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, and would be sent to Jakarta for further investigation.

“We have been working very hard round the clock, matching the DNA of the victims and those of their respective family members,” Budi said on the phone on Tuesday.

Matching the DNA, according to Budi, was the most effective way of revealing the identities of all the victims, especially due to the condition of the remains.

He said the family members of each of the victims had arrived in Samarinda for that purpose.

He also expressed gratitude to the Australian Embassy for having brought the son of Australian Peter John Elliott, one of the victims, from Australia to Samarinda.

Elliot’s remains were found among the wreckage of the aircraft on the slope of Mt. Mayang on the border of Bontang East Kutai.

Budi said that although Elliot was the only foreign victim, his body was difficult to identify because of severe burns.

He also said that despite such difficulties, the DVI team was confident it would be able to identify each of the victims’ bodies, but it would take time to ensure accuracy.

“The conditions of the victims were similar to the victims of the Sukhoi crash. The Sukhoi victims were evacuated earlier while those of the Cessna were evacuated in pieces and mixed with the elements thanks to the rain,” he said.

The flaming wreck of the Cessna plane that went missing in East Kalimantan last week was discovered late on Sunday. All the four passengers, including the pilot, were dead.

The plane, chartered by Elliott Geophysics International to survey a coal mining site, was carrying four men — pilot Capt. Marshal Basir, two Indonesians, and the company’s Australian owner, Peter John Elliot — when it vanished from the radar screens of local aircraft control on Friday evening.

The Cessna left the airport in Samarinda on Friday morning for what was to have been a 90-minute survey of a coal mining site near the city of Bontang, about 120-airline kilometers away.

After the aircraft failed to return, four helicopters and a 400-personstrong search-and-rescue team attempted to find the Cessna.

The aircraft was located on the slopes of Mt. Mayang in East Kutai regency.

Wednesday 29 August 2012

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/08/29/crash-victims-identification-process-continues.html

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Tuesday 28 August 2012

Chinese fishermen killed as typhoon hits South Korea

A powerful typhoon has struck South Korea, killing at least eight people including five fishermen. Strong winds and heavy rain churned up rough seas and smashed two fishing ships on to rocks, forcing the coastguard to perform a daring rescue for the survivors.

Rescuers saved 12 fishermen and were still searching for 10 missing from the Chinese ships, which hit rocks off South Korea's southern Jeju island.

At least three other people died as Typhoon Bolaven knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, cancelled flights and temporarily halted joint war games by US and South Korean military forces.

State media in North Korea, which is still struggling to rebuild from recent floods and a devastating drought, reported on Tuesday the country was being lashed by heavy rain and strong winds.

Off Jeju island, dangerous waves kept rescue vessels from approaching the Chinese fishing ships. The coastguard used a special gun to shoot rope to one ship so officers could pull themselves over and bring the fishermen back to shore, coastguard spokesman Ko Chang-keon said.

Eighteen fishermen survived. Twelve were rescued by the coastguard and the others swam or were washed ashore.

South Korea issued a storm warning for the capital, Seoul, as Bolaven battered the country's south and west, knocking over street lights and church spires and ripping down shop signs. A large container box crushed the caretaker of an apartment building to death, a woman fell to her death from a rooftop and a third person died after bricks hit a house, according to disaster and fire officials.

Strong gusts left Seoul streets covered with leaves, rubbish and branches. More than 15,000 schools cancelled classes, and businesses and homes boarded up windows.

More than 330,000 South Korean households lost power, the government said, and more than 70 people were left homeless because of floods or storm damage. Nearly 200 flights were cancelled.

In North Korea, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency reported gale-force winds and heavy rain in many parts of the country. Rainstorms often mean catastrophe in the north because of poor drainage, deforestation and decrepit infrastructure.

North Korea is still trying to help people with food, shelter, healthcare and clean water after heavy flooding in July, according to a recent United Nations report. More than 170 died nationwide, and tens of thousands of homes were destroyed in the floods, according to official North Korean accounts.

Many flood victims still live in tents with limited access to water and other basic facilities, the UN report said, and there is concern about malnutrition. Seoul's unification ministry approved a trip Wednesday by two South Korean aid groups to visit the North Korean city of Kaesong for talks on flood aid.

Weather officials had warned that Bolaven would be the strongest typhoon to hit the region in several years, but its gusts turned out not to be as powerful as expected.

The typhoon hit the southern Japanese island of Okinawa on Monday, injuring four people but doing less damage than feared before moving off to sea. More than 75,000 households lost power.

Further south, another typhoon, Tembin, doubled back and hit Taiwan three days after drenching the same region before blowing out to sea. Fierce winds and rain toppled coconut trees in the beach resort town of Hengchun.

In Manila, the Philippine weather agency reissued typhoon warnings to residents and fishermen for Tembin, which blew out of the archipelago over the weekend. Fishing boats in the north were urged not to venture out to sea while larger ships were warned of possible big waves and heavy rains.

Tuesday 28 August 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/28/fishermen-killed-typhoon-south-korea

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36 Egyptians missing, 3 dead after boat sinks trying to reach Europe illegally

Three bodies washed ashore in Libya Monday after a boat carrying illegal Egyptian migrants trying to reach Europe capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, and officials say 36 people are missing.

The boat’s only known survivor, Mohamed Gomaa Abdel-Kader, 23, told authorities that 40 people were on the boat when it sank. They were traveling overnight Sunday from an Egyptian port near Libya. They were part of a three-boat convoy full of migrants heading to Europe illegally, he said, according to a statement from Egypt’s Foreign Ministry.

The growing crisis from the flood of refugees could prompt Turkey to ask the United Nations to create a haven in Syria.

The boat he was on was supposed to carry no more than 15 people. It started sinking from the weight of the passengers, and people began jumping into the sea in the middle of the night, he said.

The search for survivors was continuing in the Burdi area, the officials in Cairo said.

In Libya, the state news agency Lana reported that the boat was carrying around 40 illegal migrants and capsized off Libya's east coast near the border with Egypt, with only one passenger surviving the tragedy.

"All the migrants who were on board died, except for one person who survived and was able to alert local authorities and inform them of the tragedy," Lana said, quoting a local official.

It was not immediately clear who the passengers of the boat were but they are widely believed to be asylum seekers trying to get to Europe in search of jobs and a better life.

Lana did not give the nationalities of the passengers but said the boat sunk some three kilometres (almost two miles) off the Libya coast.

Libya has been traditionally a launchpad for African refugees and migrants seeking to make an illegal run across the sea to Europe, with many landing in Italy. Migrants and refugees often travel in rickety and overcrowded wooden fishing boats and there have been several accidents at sea.

Thousands of young North African men make the dangerous and illegal sea journey to Europe to flee poverty, high unemployment and low wages at home. Some leave from Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, but most travel overland to neighboring Libya to take the shorter trip from there.

In April last year, scores of people went missing at sea after a tiny boat carrying more than 200 African migrants fleeing unrest-hit Libya capsized in the night in three-metre-high waves.

In March 2010, around 18 Egyptians drowned at sea trying to flee illegally to Europe. In 2007, 22 people died when two smuggler boats carrying around 150 Egyptians capsized off Italy’s southern coast. The next month, another boat sank off Turkey, killing 50, half of them Egyptians.

Tuesday 28 August 2012

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/officials-36-egyptians-missing-3-dead-after-boat-sinks-trying-to-reach-europe-illegally/2012/08/27/9ec26664-f055-11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_story.html

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Monday 27 August 2012

Flood Situation Worsens in Adamawa as 15 Bodies Wash Ashore.

The flood situation in Adamawa State worsened on Monday with the death toll in the disaster increasing as 15 bodies washed ashore the River Benue bank, in Jimeta—Yola, just as the state government commenced immediate evacuation of the communities along the bank of the River Benue across seven local government areas of the state.

Adamawa State Secretary to Government, Chief Kobis Ari Thinmnu, told journalists on Monday that the state government was having serious crisis coping with the situation, as over 45 communities have been totally submerged.

He appealed to the federal government through the National Emergency Management Agency to come to the immediate assistance of the Adamawa people, as the disaster was beyond the scope of the state government.

Thinmnu said that it was unfortunate, that Nigeria has no bilateral protocol with the republic of Cameroom on the usage of the waters of Lagdo dam, adding that, the release of water by the dam authorities, every rainy season, has always caused enormous damage to the people of the state.

He appealed to the federal government to approach the Cameroonian authorities so that modalities could be worked out, to remedy disaster situations, as the people of the state are always on the receiving end.

He stressed that over N100million worth of properties have been lost to the current disaster, adding, that at leat 60 buildings had been reported to have collapsed in one local government alone. Other properties lost to the disaster included farms and livestock.

In the meantime, the Adamawa State government, at the weekend, set-up a disaster management committee, to manage the situation as the water level continues to rise.

The principal medical officer in charge of the Yola Specialist Hospital, Dr Bala Saidu, told THISDAY, that some victims of the flood were brought to the hospital's mortuary. He said it would be difficult to give an exact number of bodies so far recovered, because it was rising as the situation worsens.

He however said as at the weekend, 15 corpses were deposited at the hospital.

Monday 27 August 2012

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/flood-situation-worsens-in-adamawa-as-15-bodies-wash-ashore-/123333/

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Hispaniola death toll from Isaac climbs to 10

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haitians began to dig themselves out of the mud on Sunday, one day after Tropical Storm Isaac doused the Caribbean nation and killed eight people here and another two in neighboring Dominican Republic.

With a reported total of 10 deaths for the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by the two countries, the scale of devastation was less than many people had feared.

But the capital and countryside of disaster-prone Haiti did suffer sporadic flooding, fallen poles and scores of toppled tents that housed people who lost their homes in the massive 2010 earthquake.

Joseph Edgard Celestin of Haiti's Civil Protection Office offered few details on the storm-related deaths, but said one man was swept away as he tried to cross a river in a village in the country's north.

Haiti's Civil Protection Office said in a separate report that a 51-year-old woman was killed in the southern coastal town of Marigot after a tree fell on her home. A 10-year-old girl was killed in the village of Thomazeau after a wall collapsed on her.

In neighboring Dominican Republic, police reported that two men were swept away by flooded rivers that burst their banks. One victim was identified as Pedro Peralta, a former mayor in Villa Altagracia, a town northwest of the capital of Santo Domingo. His body was recovered Sunday by rescuers on the banks of the Haina River.

Another male victim, whose identity was not disclosed, was swept away by the Yaguaza River, Dominican police said.

Across Haiti, the number of people evacuated due to flooding rose over the weekend. More than 14,000 people had left their homes and another 13,500 people were living in temporary shelters until Saturday night, the Civil Protection Office reported. Some 8,400 evacuees were in the country's western department, the most populous and where the capital of Port-au-Prince is located.

The World Food Program had distributed two days of food to 8,300 of the people who had left their houses for 18 camps.

The Haitian government reported that a dozen houses were destroyed and another 269 damaged.

Impoverished Haiti is prone to flooding and mudslides because much of the country is heavily deforested and rainwater rushes down barren mountainsides. It's not uncommon for storms to turn deadly; a storm in the Caribbean last year unleashed mudslides that killed more than 20 people in the capital.

In Fourgy, a hardscrabble neighborhood in the northern part of Port-au-Prince, residents used buckets and brooms to clean out mud from their homes and courtyards as chocolate-color flood waters from the nearby Grise River began to recede.

The water arrived early Saturday morning, rising up to the waist of an average adult, but by Sunday it had dropped to about shin high. Still, it was enough to destroy the few belongings of some people.

Rene Stevenson readily gave an inventory of possessions lost to the flood: bed, radio, TV set, plastic chairs.

"Everything's totally lost," fumed Stevenson, a 24-year-old cab driver with dried mud on his bare chest.

If mud caused anguish in Fourgy, wind was the source of despair down the street in Pwa Kongo neighborhood. Isaac blew down rows of tents and other temporary shelters people had lived since they lost their homes in the 2010 earthquake.

Displaced again, the several dozen occupants took their belongings and spent Saturday night sleeping on the wooden pews of a small church next door.

"There's a church so we're here," said Arel Homme Derastel, a 32-year-old father of three. "All's broken."

Monday 27 August 2012

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/hispaniola-death-toll-isaac-climbs-10

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Flooding Kills 10 in Northeast Nigeria

An emergency management official in northeast Nigeria says 10 people were killed in floods that swept through the region.

Adamawa state Emergency Management Agency official Shadrach Daniel Baruk said others remained trapped by the flooding Sunday.

Baruk blamed the release of water from a dam in the neighboring nation of Cameroon for the flood. He said heavy rainfall in the rural region of farms and cattle ranches also contributed to the deadly deluge. He said thousands of people had been displaced.

The flooding in Adamawa state comes as flooding recently killed at least 68 people in Plateau state in central Nigeria.

Nigeria is experiencing its annual rainy season, which sees torrential rains fall throughout the West African nation.

Monday 27 august 2012

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/flooding-kills-10-northeast-nigeria-17083592#.UDswffvcz3U

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50 Die in 3 Accidents Within 3 Days in China

A bus and a tanker collided and burst into flames, killing 36 people in China’s northwestern Shaanxi Province, on Aug. 26.

The accident occurred around 2:40 a.m. near the city of Yan’an. A double-decker sleeper bus appeared to have rear-ended a tanker carrying methanol, killing all but three of its 39 passengers.

An incident investigation group was sent to the site by the State Council, according to a report by state-run media Xinhua, indicating that central regime officials were concerned about the incident.

Another crash killed 11 of 12 passengers when a van hit a large truck on an expressway in Sichuan Province Sunday afternoon. The truck had pulled to the side of the road for repairs, local workers said, according to Xinhua.

Three more people died when a bridge collapsed on Friday, Aug. 24, in the city of Harbin in northeastern China. The Yangmingtan Bridge had been in use for less than a year and cost 1.88 billion yuan (US$294 million) to build.

Monday 27 august 2012

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/50-die-in-3-accidents-within-3-days-in-china-284277.html

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Sunday 26 August 2012

Tanker-bus crash inferno kills 36 in China

At least 36 people died in a fiery collision between a methanol tanker and a double-decker sleeper bus on a motorway in northern China on Sunday, officials and state media said. Both vehicles caught fire and only three of the 39 people onboard the bus survived the crash, which occurred around 2:00 am, Xinhua news agency reported.

A total of 36 bodies were pulled from the debris and three people were taken to hospital.

Details of the crash -- which happened 200 metres (yards) from a motorway service station at Yanan city in Shaanxi province -- were still unclear.

Yue Jiuxiang, a local traffic police official in charge of the rescue operation, said most of the passengers were asleep at the time of the crash.

"Soon after the collision, the bus was engulfed by flames," he told state-broadcaster China Central Television.

"The front part of the bus was seriously damaged. Also most of the passengers were sleeping. This is why so many people died."

Yue said the bus was en route from Baotou in Inner Mongolia to the Shaanxi provincial capital Xian when the collision occurred.

Police were investigating the cause of the accident which happened on the Baotou-Maoming Expressway, which spans the length of China from the northern city of Baotou to the southern province of Guangdong.

An official at Yanan city government information department surnamed Liu told AFP: "The confirmed death toll is now 36. I don't have any further details."

China's roads are highly dangerous, with traffic laws and safety widely flouted, and truck drivers typically overworked.

Last year more than 62,000 people died in traffic accidents, state media said, citing police figures.

Vehicles carrying explosive materials -- which must first get permission from the police before travelling on the roads in China -- are involved in many accidents.

At least 20 people were killed in June near the southern city of Guangzhou when two trucks collided and sent petrol into a timber mill below the road, causing a massive blaze.

Buses are also commonly involved in road accidents as operators often seek to cram as many people as they can into their vehicles to maximise profits and drivers hurtle down highways.

Twenty-three people were killed and three injured in April when a bus and truck collided in the eastern province of Anhui. Another collision between a tour bus and a truck the same month left 13 dead and 21 injured.

Sunday 26 August 2012

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/China/Tanker-bus-crash-inferno-kills-36-in-China/Article1-919537.aspx

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Refinery Blast In Venezuela Kills At Least 39

A huge explosion rocked Venezuela's biggest oil refinery and unleashed a ferocious fire on Saturday, killing at least 39 people and injuring more than 80 others in one of the deadliest disasters ever to hit the country's key oil industry.

Balls of fire rose over the Amuay refinery, among the largest in the world, in video posted on the Internet by people who were nearby at the time. Government officials pledged to restart the refinery within two days and said the country has plenty of fuel supplies on hand to meet domestic needs as well as its export commitments.

The explosion shattered walls of nearby shops, ripped out windows from homes and left the surrounding streets covered with rubble and twisted scraps of metal.

President Hugo Chavez declared three days of mourning and ordered an investigation to determine the cause of the explosion. "This affects all of us," Chavez said by phone on state television. "It's very sad, very painful."

Vice President Elias Jaua, who traveled to the area in western Venezuela, said on state television late Saturday that at least 39 people were killed by the explosion, up from the earlier death toll of 26. He said that the dead included 18 National Guard troops and that six of the bodies had not yet been identified. Other officials said earlier that the dead included a 10-year-old boy.

In a neighborhood next to the refinery, shopkeeper Yolimar Romero said she was at her computer when a shock wave swept over the area shortly after 1 a.m.

"At that instant, the whole house shook as if it were an earthquake," she said. "The windows went flying off with their frames and everything."

Electricity was knocked out, leaving Romero in the dark and her house filled with smoke. She found a flashlight and started looking for her husband and three children.

Outside on the street, the family saw scattered hunks of brick walls and ruins of a National Guard post and about 20 other homes. Bodies were being pulled from buildings down the street.

At least 86 people were injured, nine of them seriously, Health Minister Eugenia Sader said at a hospital where the wounded were taken. She said 77 people suffered light injuries and were released.

Officials said firefighters had largely controlled the fire at the refinery on the Paraguana Peninsula, where flames were still visible on Saturday night after billowing dark smoke all day.

The blast occurred about 1:15 a.m. when a natural gas leak created a cloud that ignited, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said.

"That gas generated a cloud that later exploded and has caused fires in at least two tanks of the refinery and surrounding areas," Ramirez said.

Images shortly after the explosion showed the flames casting an orange glow against the night sky, and injured survivors on a stretcher and in a wheelchair. The bloodied bodies of victims were loaded onto pickup trucks.

Ramirez said a panel of investigators was being formed to determine the cause of the gas leak. A prosecutor was appointed to lead the investigation and troops were deployed to the area.

While the cause of the disaster remains unclear, some oil workers and critics of Chavez's government have recently pointed to increasing numbers of smaller accidents and spills as an indication of problems within the state-run company.

"We warned that something was going to happen, a catastrophic event," said Ivan Freites, secretary general of a 1,200-member union of oil and natural gas industry workers in Falcon state where the refinery is located. He spoke in a telephone interview from an area near the refinery, where he could see the flames raging in the distance.

The refinery complex's general manager, Jesus Luongo, denied that a lack of maintenance was to blame, saying in the past three years more than $6 billion has been invested in maintaining the country's refineries.

Ramirez said the explosion hit an area of storage tanks, damaging nine tanks.

"All of the events happened very quickly," Ramirez said. "When we got here in the middle of the night, at 3 or 3:30 in the morning, the fire was at its peak."

The oil minister said that supplies of fuel had been cut off to part of the refinery and that firefighters were using foam to extinguish the flames in one of the remaining tanks.

"This regrettable and sad event is controlled, is under control," Ramirez said on television, while plumes of smoke continued to billow.

Amuay is part of the Paraguana Refinery Complex, which also includes the adjacent Cardon refinery. Together, the two refineries process about 900,000 barrels of crude per day and 200,000 barrels of gasoline. Venezuela is a major supplier of oil to the U.S. and a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Ramirez said the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA should be able to "restart operations in a maximum of two days."

"We want to tell the country that we have sufficient inventories of fuel. We have 10 days of inventory of fuel," Ramirez said. He said the country's other refineries were operating at full capacity and would be able to "deal with any situation in our domestic market."

An official of the state oil company, known as PDVSA, said the country also has enough supplies on hand to guarantee its international supply commitments. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

In terms of international oil markets, the disaster is not likely to cause much of a ripple, said Jason Schenker, an energy analyst and president of Austin, Texas-based Prestige Economics LLC. Noting that other refinery accidents and shutdowns regularly occur around the world, he said: "There's likely to be relatively limited impact on global crude or product pricing."

"The real tragedy," he said, "is that these events continue to happen, not just in Venezuela but everywhere. It is a dangerous business."

Gustavo Coronel, an energy consultant and former PDVSA executive, called the tragedy "probably the worst one the oil industry has had in many years."

"Accidents happen, of course, although the problem with PDVSA is the inordinate amount of accidents that have taken place during the last years," Coronel said. Considering the overall record, "we are not talking about bad luck but about lack of maintenance and inept management," he said.

The labor leader Freites, who has worked at the refinery for 29 years, said workers had repeatedly alerted state oil company officials to problems that they feared could lead to an accident. "We've been complaining about problems and risks, including fires, broken pipes and a lack of spare parts," Freites said.

One opposition group comprised of former PDVSA employees, Gente del Petroleo, or Oil People, said it could not yet pass judgment on the cause of the explosion. But it but noted there had been ample concerns about lack of maintenance and poor management.

The group said in a statement that since 2003, 79 other serious accidents have been reported at the Paraguana Refinery Complex, collectively killing a total of 19 workers and injuring 67 others.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who is challenging Chavez in the country's Oct. 7 presidential election, expressed condolences to the victims and their families.

"We Venezuelans are one, and we grow in the face of this type of situations," Capriles said.

Sunday 26 August 2012

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/25/160031185/officials-refinery-blast-in-venezuela-kills-7

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Slovenia hot-air balloon victims identified, investigation underway

LJUBLJANA - Slovenia said Saturday it has identified the four people killed in Thursday's hot-air balloon crash as Slovenian citizens, among them a couple with their 11-year-old child.

"The fourth person killed was a woman, also from Slovenia," Joze Balazic, head of Slovenia's forensic institute, said Saturday.

The identification had to be carried out using the DNA of the victims since their bodies were found charred in the basket of the hot-air balloon that crashed and burst into flames near Ljubljana early on Thursday.

The accident happened when a sudden change in the weather forced the pilot of the balloon with 32 people on board, mostly tourists, to attempt an emergency landing.

Due to its size and the strong winds blowing close to the surface, the pilot lost control of the balloon, which hit a tree and caught fire, according to eye witnesses.

Out of the 28 persons who were hospitalised on Thursday, six remain in critical condition, among them the pilot of the balloon, hospital authorities said late on Friday.

Slovenian police have launched an investigation to determine whether there were irregularities concerning the flight organised by a private company selling balloon flights to tourists.

Local media reported the pilot did not have a valid flying license and that he decided to take off although the weather forecast indicated possible storms. Police have not yet confirmed the reports.

Sunday 26 August 2012

http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20120825-367561.html

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Saturday 25 August 2012

FIRE TRAGEDY VICTIMS TO UNDERGO DNA TESTS

A team of doctors from Nairobi is expected in Homa Bay District to carry out DNA tests on pupils of St Theresa Asumbi Girls Boarding Primary School who died in a fire.

The doctors are expected tomorrow morning to carry out the tests to help identify the bodies that were burnt beyond recognition.

Homa Bay DC Nur Dube said some parents had not identified their children, and the best solution was a DNA test.

Homa Bay Hospital Medical Superintendent Ojwang’ Ayoma confirmed that only four children had been identified. The medic’s statement negated previous reports that indicated that the number of bodies identified children had risen to five.

Dr Ayoma said his medical officers were ready to help any parents identify their children, especially if the deceased’s individual conditions can allow.

“We received some parents and many relatives of the deceased girls yesterday. We identified four of them while the other four have not been identified.” Ayoma added.

The bodies are still lying at the Homa Bay District Hospital Mortuary where they were taken on Wednesday night.

Parents and relatives used various methods such body posture, teeth arrangement, and other parts of the body, which were not destroyed completely, to identify their children.

There are contradictory reports as to what the pupils were doing in school even though Education Minister Mutula Kilonzo had outlawed holiday tuition. The school management said the students were from an academic tour of Nairobi and Nakuru, while parents say the pupils were on holiday tuition.

Saturday 25 August 2012

http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/m/story.php?id=2000064809

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Bagmati boat capsize: 3 bodies found‚ scores missing

RAUTAHAT: At least three persons died and an unknown number of people went missing as a boat, with about 50-55 people on board, capsized in the swollen Bagmati River bordering Sarahi and Rautahat districts on Saturday afternoon.

The jam-packed boat was coming towards Laxmipur Ghat of Rautahat from Manpur of Sarlahi on the otherside of the river when it overturned at around 2:30 pm.

Police said one person has been rescued alive and has been taken to Garuda of Rautahat for treatment.

Two bodies were fished out from the swollen river, while one of the two persons who was rescued alive died.

The deceased are identified as Apsana Khatun (13), Rajima Khatun (20) and Nisrat Khatun (37) of Gamariya, Parsa-7 Laxmipur.

It has been learnt that Nisrat's two children were also on board the ill-fated boat. Their whereabouts is not known.

Two boaters—identified as Ramjodhi Sahani and Wazir Sahani of Manpur, Sarlahi—are at large after the incident, while all other people riding the boat are said to be missing.

Security personnel and locals are launching a search operation for the missing.

Saturday 25 August 2012

http://www.thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=Bagmati+boat+capsize%3A+3+bodies+found%E2%80%9A+scores+missing&NewsID=344772

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Friday 24 August 2012

Bodies of 2 pilots flown to Cebu

CEBU CITY, Philippines—The bodies of the two pilots of the light plane that crashed off Masbate with Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo were flown to Cebu on Thursday.

The body of Captain Jessup Bahinting, 61, chair and chief executive officer of Aviatour Air, was accompanied by his daughter Sarah Lynn on board a Beechcraft RPC 9980 plane, which landed at the Mactan Cebu International Airport at 8:01 a.m.

At 3:03 p.m., Cessna 182 RPC 2214 arrived with the body of Bahinting’s Nepali copilot, Kshitiz Chand, 21.

Bahinting and Chand piloted the Piper Seneca plane that was supposed to bring Robredo from Cebu to Naga City in Camarines Sur. But the plane reportedly experienced engine trouble and was trying do an emergency landing at the Masbate Airport when it crashed into the sea.

Bahinting’s body was retrieved from the right side of the cockpit on Wednesday, according to media reports. Sarah identified her father through his Fossil watch and ring.

Bahinting’s wife Margarita expressed dismay at the reports that her husband was found on the right side of the cockpit, saying this was erroneous.

She said that her husband was at the left side of the plane, on the seat of the main pilot. She said the media reports could be misconstrued that Bahinting had allowed the student pilot to handle the plane.

The body of Chand was found floating near the crash site Thursday morning.

Bahinting’s friends and the students of Bahinting’s Aviatour Flight School, formed a line when the small plane arrived. They were all emotional as Bahinting’s wife cried when the body bag containing the remains of her husband, was pulled out of the plane, said former Cebu City Councilor Sylvan Jakosalem.

Bahinting’s body was taken to St. Peter Funeral Homes on New Imus street where the wake would be held until Sunday noon. It will be transferred to Ginatilan town, about 135 km southwest of Cebu City, for burial on Monday, said Sarah Lynn.

Chand’s father, Tek Bahadur Chand and uncle, Damand Chand, arrived in Cebu at 3:17 p.m. on board another plane. Chand’s body was expected to be flown to Nepal.

Friday 24 August 2012

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/256222/body-of-robredos-pilot-transferred-to-cebu

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Thursday 23 August 2012

10 die in Jaipur of rain-triggered disasters

Jaipur, Aug 22 (IANS) Rains continued to create havoc as the death toll rose to eight in this Rajasthan capital in incidents of wall collapses and electrocution, an official said Wednesday.

Two more deaths were reported from rural areas in Jaipur district, he added.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh telephoned Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and took stock of the situation. An officials said that Manmohan Singh had assured all possible help in tackling the situation.

Over 100 colonies in low-lying areas and the Walled City are inundated since Tuesday night, theofficial said.

“In view of the situation, the chief minister took a meeting of senior administration officers and instructed them to launch the relief work on a war footing. He has asked the district collectors to arrange and use all disaster management equipment to bring relief to the people across the state who were affected due to rains,” a senior administration official told IANS.

He added that the district collectors have been asked to arrange for sacks of sands and use them in low-lying areas, so that water does not gather in residential colonies. Control rooms have also been set up at district headquarters where affected people can call and seek help.

“Jaipur and some other districts in northern and eastern parts of the state have been asked to remain extra alert as warning of another spell of heavy rains have been made by the meteorology department,” said the officer.

Normal life and vehicular traffic came to a standstill in several districts, including Sikar, Dausa, Jhunjhunu and Dholpur due to the heavy rains.

The Jaipur district administration had announced a holiday for all government and private schools Wednesday.

Heavy rains, that began lashing the city from 11 p.m. Tuesday, were estimated at 148.4 mm Wednesday morning.

With the rains continuing for nearly four hours, people spent a sleepless night as water gushed into their houses, damaging belongings.

In several slum areas, people were forced to take shelter on rooftops.

Mayor Jyoti Khandelwal told reporters that markets in the walled city and the slum areas in Jawahar Nagar, Shashtri Nagar and Sodala were the worst-affected.

“All senior officials and disaster management staff of Jaipur Municipal Corporation are in the field assessing the situation and pumping water out of the inundated colonies,” said Khandelwal.

But residents complained of poor management by JMC.

“Rains have been continuing for one week. However, municipal officials did not take precautionary measures,” Shilpa Kumawat, living in the low-lying Johari Bazaar said.

She and her family have been trying to pump accumulated water out of their house since morning.

Electricity supply too had snapped in almost half of the city in the morning due to the rain.

Thursday 23 August 2012

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/enviornment/10-die-in-jaipur-of-rain-triggered-disasters-lead_100640051.html

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Most Fukushima quake deaths were elderly

TOKYO, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Most of the people who died in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis were elderly, an agency report says.

The Reconstruction Agency study found about 90 percent of the 1,263 disaster-related deaths were of people at least 70 years old, The Mainichi Shimbun reported.

More than half of the victims, or 638 people, died from effects of the triple disaster in March 2011, the agency said. Of those, 433 died in Fukushima Prefecture, the location of the nuclear energy facility heavily damaged by the quake and tidal wave.

Of the total deaths, about half died within one month of the disaster. About 80 percent died within three months.

Fatigue from living in evacuation centers was cited as the single biggest cause of post-disaster death.

Many of the Fukushima victims died after being forced to move from hospitals or nursing homes after the reactor was damaged.

The report said 283 died because hospitals were not able to function or because the victims' illnesses worsened.

The report recommended upgrading existing laws to ensure adequate emergency food supplies, proactive action against bad weather and prevention of disaster-related deaths by providing appropriate health care.

Thursday 23 August 2012

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/08/22/Most-Fukushima-quake-deaths-were-elderly/UPI-44801345658506/#ixzz24MuqzAhX

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Heavy rain, floods kill 14 in Pakistan: Officials

ISLAMABAD: Flash floods triggered by heavy rain have killed at least 14 people and destroyed dozens of houses in northern Pakistan, officials said on Thursday.

Irshad Bhatti, a spokesman for the country’s National Disaster Management Authority said the death toll may rise as survey teams have reported more deaths but are still assessing the extent of damages.

Most of the deaths were reported in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where nine people died and more than 50 houses were destroyed. In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, six people were killed after a roof collapsed.

“The death toll may rise, we are assessing the damages. Rescue work is continuing and relief activities have started,” Bhatti said.

Adnan Khan, an official from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa confirmed the death toll and said he feared more deaths.

“Dozens of families have suffered and their houses were destroyed, several people are still missing” Khan told AFP.

Floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2011 affected 5.8 million people, with floodwaters killing livestock, destroying crops, homes and infrastructure as the nation struggled to recover from record inundations the previous year.

Thursday 23 august 2012

http://tribune.com.pk/story/425167/heavy-rain-floods-kill-14-in-pakistan-officials/

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Mass grave raises ghosts from the past

DO DONTREI, Cambodia — It was four grey skulls resting on a bed of jumbled bones that again triggered Chea Nouen's memories: breast-feeding her baby with her hands and feet shackled; her husband thrown into a pit to be turned into human fertilizer, her own marches to the killing fields — where she was saved three times by an executioner.

The past came hurtling back earlier this month when a new mass grave was discovered in this village in northwestern Cambodia, one of the bloodiest killing grounds in the country. Like most of Cambodia's some 300 known mass grave clusters, it is not being investigated or exhumed to find out what happened.

More than three decades after the Khmer Rouge ultra-revolutionaries orchestrated the deaths of nearly 2 million people, or one out of every four Cambodians, this country has not laid its ghosts to rest. Cambodia's regime prefers to literally bury the past, especially since some of its current leaders, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, were once Khmer Rouge.

But 63-year-old Chea Nouen and other survivors in this small, farming community cannot forget, hold their tears in check or banish the nightmares when they daily tread over the unexamined bones of 35,000 victims and live among restless souls that still hover, they believe, over homes and rice fields. Also unfinished is the pursuit of justice: Neither the three top Khmer Rouge leaders nor local executioners have been punished, with the exception of a controversial jail sentence of 19 years for the former prison chief known as Comrade Duch.

In April, Chea Nouen was invited to the capital, Phnom Penh, to hear a top Khmer Rouge official, Nuon Chea, offer his defense to a U.N.-backed tribunal: I didn't know. I was just carrying out orders. It's an exaggeration. The U.N. and the tribunal say they are following the law. But Chea Nouen calls the trial "an absurdity," incredulous that it has taken six years, $160 million and mountains of documents to prove a case against three now feeble octogenarians when all seems so starkly clear to the villagers at Do Dontrei.

"At my age and health, I cannot confront the Khmer Rouge, " says the 63-year-old woman. "But I would be pleased to tell my story."

Her body is almost skeletal and wracked by persistent illnesses from the Khmer Rouge years, but Chea Nouen's animated face, striking poses and still supple hands conjure up the past in powerful pantomime.

She contorts her body, demonstrating how her legs and arms were bound to an iron bar. Her face grimaces in remembered pain. A soldier points a pistol to her temple, another searches her body for hidden valuables. In shock, she drops her 2-month-old son to the prison floor. For seven days, almost sleepless and surviving on just water, she cradles her child, twisting her body to allow him to suckle at her breasts. Chea Nouen, back in the present, brushes tears away with a yellow towel.

Their family, with two children, had been arrested one morning while riding in an ox-cart. A day after her release, her husband was taken away to the foot of a hill, close by the recently discovered grave, where the Khmer Rouge vented their hatred of former government soldiers like him with singular fury.

Blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, they were savagely beaten, slashed with machetes and pushed into pits stocked with rice husks that were set ablaze. The ashes and decomposed bodies fused into fertilizer to be scattered over the rice fields.

Although still under official arrest, Chea Nouen was released to a Khmer Rouge complex that included dormitories, a warehouse and communal dining. She grew vegetables, worked grueling hours in the rice paddies and kitchen. One of her sons succumbed to illness, the other died of starvation.

Of the hundreds of workers who passed through the center, all of them women, only seven survived the deprivation and a methodical killing machine not unlike those at Nazi concentration camps. Executions took place once or twice a week, with batches of 60 to 80 prisoners, and often timed to the fertilizer production.

"We are all just like fish in the water. One day they will hook us all," she told a co-worker who sensed her own time had come and asked Chea Nouen to take gold she had secreted to pass on one day to her children. Chea Nouen declined, believing she herself wouldn't survive. The following day, after the evening meal, her friend disappeared.

Chea Nouen rises, head bent to the ground, her arms clasped behind her as if pinioned by ropes. She is trudging off with a line of others toward the pits. The killers await them, naked torsos sweating. She hears shouts, wailing and cursing from those about to die. Then, the chief of the execution squad, a man she had provided with bath water, halts the file of prisoners.

"I don't know why he was so kind and saved my life. He did it three times. Maybe he felt sympathy for me. Maybe he loved me," she says. Nhorn was the only name she knew him by, and after the Khmer Rouge downfall she never saw him again.

"Whenever I think of the Khmer Rouge time I don't feel hunger or thirst," she says, sinking into her chair in a ramshackle hut open to the rains and mosquitoes. "I feel nothing except the feeling that I am already dead."

She has a proper house in the village, home to some 600 people, but prefers the forest retreat where she can better raise chickens, ducks and four cows, and where there is a peace and quiet for which she longs.

Her face still flushed, Chea Nouen ends her story on a lighter note, relating how a ghost appeared in the dream of the businessman who bought the land with the skulls from a farmer, one day after the remains were found. The spectral visitor recommended he go for the number 50 in a lottery. He won $1,500 and paid for a ceremony at the newly-found grave.

"My husband never comes to see me or give me a winning lottery number, so I'm still poor," she laughs. "I didn't even pray for a lottery number at the ceremony. I just thanked the spirits for saving my life."

The remains from the grave were placed in a makeshift shrine under the shade of three palm trees, and the villagers of Do Dontrei brought soup, rice, desserts and a little money to the crude altar as offerings.

They worry that the spirits are troubled. There is a widespread belief in Cambodia that the bones of the deceased — especially those who met violent deaths — should be collected, cremated and prayed over lest they remain in the place they died to haunt the living.

But rural folk — the "little people," as they have been called — still have little voice or legal recourse in face of rich power-brokers, and the businessman who purchased the land for $4,700 for construction has close connections in the nearby provincial capital of Siem Reap. So the digging continues.

Khung Leang, a handsome 53-year-old woman with a ready smile, says she may never know where her entire family lies. She conducted rites for their souls, but they still return to her in disturbing dreams.

"They stood here. But they refused to come up," she says, sitting on steps leading to the first story of her stilt-propped house. "My father said, 'I can't enter because there is a stick in the house and I will be beaten.' I didn't know, but there was actually one there. I threw it away, and a few days later they came again. And again they refused to come into the house. My father just stood on these steps, crying."

Khung Leang thinks of the "crimes" that led to the slaughter of her mother, her father and all six of her siblings. They had been damned as "rich capitalists" because they sold sweets in the market. Later, they were discovered eating chicken soup one night as a family, violating bans on private property and eating outside communal quarters. The last of her father's three "crimes" was "destroying Khmer Rouge property" by failing to stop cows he was ordered to herd from grazing in a rice field.

Her father was taken away first. She doesn't know how he died. Later she was told that before his execution, he pleaded with friends: "Please take care of my daughter. She will soon be alone."

And she was. They all followed him, even the youngest, her four-year-old sister, because the Khmer Rouge liked to say: "If you don't want grass to grow you have to pull out all the roots underneath."

Like Chea Nouen, she regards her cheating of death — twice — as miraculous.

Like many women and despite protest, she was forced into marriage with a man the Khmer Rouge had chosen for her. And like many young couples, they were assigned to a mobile brigade, tasked with back-breaking work in remote areas after separation from their families. She was away when her family was exterminated.

Sometime later, she and others were being herded to an execution site when a Khmer Rouge cadre suddenly barked, "That is enough. We have reached our quota today. Take the others back."

A cooling evening breeze sweeps through the garden around Khung Leang's home as she finishes her tale, one with a happy ending. A sprightly little girl, one of six grandchildren, rushes into her arms. A handsome 23-year-old son returns from teaching school.

Their family makes ends meet, growing rice and vegetables and still selling the traditional sweets from rice and palm sugar that once precipitated the tragedy. Her husband — the same she once adamantly rejected — drives a motorcycle taxi.

"He is a very kind-hearted man," she says.

Pools of stagnant, milky green water lay at the bottom of the burial pits. The backhoe gouged out more earth.

"If the investigators don't come and conduct a proper search, all the remains will soon disappear," said farmer Chhorn Kry, standing at the grave's edge, near where nine members of his wife's family were executed.

The survivors of Do Dontrei believe the spirits are still trapped. They say the graves must be opened, with proper rites, so that the spirits can fly, look for their relatives and ascend to heaven. Chea Nouen compares it to water flowing out after a bottle is opened.

Khung Leang adds a contemporary, political twist to the ancient belief: "There are many souls still with us here. They are wandering around our village, hovering above us, because they are still waiting for justice."

Thursday 23 August 2012 http://www.waxahachietx.com/apnews/world/mass-grave-raises-ghosts-from-the-past/article_d7877476-ecb3-11e1-8257-0019bb2963f4.html

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One body retrieved Nine feared drowned in Chenab

MUZAFFARGARH - Nine people were feared drowned in the River Chenab at Head Punjnad on Tuesday.

Rescue 1122 officials said on Wednesday that a boat carrying 13 people capsized due to strong river current.

Locals said these people got onto the boat along with five motorcycles after traffic on the bridge got clogged due to an influx of picnickers at the recreational place.

Of the 13 people, six were rescued by local divers or they swam out of the river, while seven were missing till Wednesday evening.

Illegal boat operators offer their services to people to take them to other side of the river when traffic on the bridge gets stuck up.

Boat operators Qasim Borani and Jamil charged Rs200 per head from people crossing the river by boat despite the fact that the district government has imposed a ban on boat operations in Chenab and Indus rivers.

The ban was imposed in 2008 when eight people drowned in the River Chenab near Sher Shah Bridge on Aug 14 the same year.

Civil Defence and police have failed to implement the ban.

Acting DCO Muzaffar Ali Sial said rescues were searching for the bodies and police had arrested a boatman and two boat contractors.

Journalist from Alipur Syed Hasan said local divers were also taking part in the rescue operation on the request of the families of missing persons. He said divers had been promised Rs20,000 to Rs50,000 for recovery of each body.

Wednesday 22 August 2012

http://dawn.com/2012/08/23/one-body-retrieved-nine-feared-drowned-in-chenab/

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10 pupils feared dead in dormitory inferno

At least ten pupils of Asumbi Boarding Primary School, in Homa Bay County, are feared dead after a fire razed their dormitory on Wednesday night.

Initial reports indicate that the ten were among class seven and eight pupils attending August holiday tuition in the school. The institution is run by the Asumbi Catholic Church parish.

The fire is suspected to have been caused by an electricity surge after a daylong power blackout in the area.

Unconfirmed reports also indicate the dormitory's door may have been bolted from outside.

Parents whose children were at the school began streaming at the institution as soon as word on the fire went out. They were however frustrated by the school's administrators who were not forthcoming with details of the inferno.

Not even the efforts by the Police and Red Cross to get the school's administrators to give an official statement worked, as the Catholic nuns and teachers went in hiding at the convent.

Rangwe DO Daniel Cheruiot, who spoke at the scene, said he counted at least eight charred remains of girls.

“Eight bodies have been recovered from the scene and taken to the Homa Bay District Hospital Mortuary,” he said.

Mr Cheruiyot said the girls had been trapped inside the dormitory, which appeared to have been locked from outside.

Homa Bay OCPD Francis Kumut also said about ten girls were feared dead in the fire.

Parish Priest Reverend Aloise Okumu said the pupils were under the care of Catholic nuns.

Thursday 23 August 2012

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/10+orphans+feared+dead+in+dormitory+inferno/-/1056/1485326/-/v4xu26/-/index.html

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DNA Test Results Identify Phuket Fire Victims

BANGKOK – Authorities are awaiting DNA test results to confirm the identity of a third victim who died in an August 17 fire at a Phuket discotheque.

At the Office of the National Police Bureau, Pol. Lt. Gen. Jarumporn Suramanee, Assistant Commissioner, confirmed the identities of two Thai victims. A fourth victim is also being identified through forensic investigation.

The two Thai women were identified as Ms. Niphapak or Sumalee Soodtasorn, and Ms. Duangporn Bootkro.

The four charred bodies were “burnt beyond recognition” and require DNA testing to determine their identities. A total of 11 people were also injured in the fire at the Tiger Discotheque.

The other two bodies are believed to be males. One victim awaiting confirmation by DNA testing is believed to be Mr. Emmanoel Becard, a Frenchman.

To help identify Mr. Emmanoel, his nail-cutting scissors and toothbrush were retrieved from his room by the forensic Evidence Verification unit, to compare with DNA samples from his burnt body. But it is difficult to find DNA from such toiletry items, an EVU officer said.

The police are coordinating with the France embassy to compare Mr. Emmanoel’s dental records with his dentist, along with the DNA of his parents.

As for the cause of the deadly fire in the 2-story building, Pol. Lt. Gen. Jarumporn said a preliminary inspection indicated it may have started from an electric cable.

The fire appears to have started in the ceiling of a second-floor room reserved for dancing, he said. There may have been more oxygen in that area to feed the flames and cause the fire to spread rapidly, he speculated.

Other media accounts report that witnesses saw sparks coming from a lighted sign outside the building before the fire started.

The police spokesman was asked if the deadly Phuket fire had any similarities to the 2009 fire at the Santika nightclub in Bangkok. That fire on New Year’s Eve killed 66 people and injured 222 others.

Pol. Lt. Gen. Jarumporn Suramanee replied that the Phuket building had similar flammable Styrofoam material that covered 20 percent of its interior. After the Santika fire, new regulations were passed to limit the use of Styrofoam to 10 percent of a building’s interior.

The Phuket building had six fire exits to comply with regulations, the police spokesman said. But the exits appeared inadequate for the size of the building. Also, not all the exits were accessible from the ground floor.

The design of the building’s interior also does not match the application form submitted to the municipal office to operate the nightclub, he said.

Thursday 23 August 2012

http://www.pattayadailynews.com/en/2012/08/23/dna-test-results-identify-phuket-fire-victims/

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Wednesday 22 August 2012

Three dead in Mara plane crash, Kenya

AN AIRCRAFT with 14 passengers has crashed in Kenya's Maasai Mara national park, one of the East African's country's most popular safari destinations for tourists, officials said.

Two pilots and a woman passenger died Wednesday after a plane crashed at an airstrip in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve.

Six passengers on board the 5YUV7 light aircraft, belonging to Mombasa air, were seriously injured as the pilots prepared to land at Ngerede Airstrip near the Mara Safari Club.

The airstrip manager Daniel Jivai, who spoke to Nation on the telephone, said he saw the aircraft wobble before it came down at around 12:17 pm.

He said 12 tourists, who were travelling from Mombasa to the Mara, were on board the plane at the time of the accident.

Three of the passengers were trapped in the wreckage but were rescued by hotel and airstrip personnel.

The rest of the passengers were receiving first aid.

“When we saw it coming down, there was a swift response from hotel personnel, tourists, and other visitors around the place and we managed to put off a small fire on one of the engines," said Mr Jivai.

A government team led by Narok South district commissioner, Chamwanga Mongo, was deployed to the area to carry out investigations.

Tourists travelling to see the spectacular wildebeest migration from Serengeti plains in Tanzania to the Mara are opting for air travel due to the bad state of the Narok-Mara road.

Cooperatives minister Joseph Nyaga, who was in Narok for an official function, cut short his speech to observe a minute of silence for those who died in the accident.

Wednesday 22 august 2012

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Three+dead+in+Mara+plane+crash/-/1056/1484818/-/jo9nok/-/index.html

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