Thursday 20 December 2012

Give death certificate to blast victim's kin: Court


The Delhi High Court Friday directed a civic agency to issue death certificates to the kin of three men killed in a 2005 bomb blast to facilitate payment of compensation to them.

The court's direction came after police said that even after seven years of the blast, all the three men could not be traced.

Police said they had filed a report that the victims were untraceable so the civic agency could issue the death certificate.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher asked New Delhi Municipal Council to issue death certificates to the family members of Michael John, A. Ganeshan and Sayan Mukhopadhyay, whose bodies could not be found after the blast.

The court further directed the city government to start the process of granting payment of compensation to the kin of the men who died in a bomb blast in Sarojini Nagar Market.

The court was hearing a plea filed by Manisha Dass claiming that when she was eight years old, her parents and brother died in the blast Oct 29, 2005.

Dass claimed that Michael John was in the market on the date of the blast in 2005 and was missing for the past seven years.

She said the body of her father Michael John was not found and the authorities refused to give compensation for his death.

The Delhi government had given Rs.7.5 lakh compensation to Dass for the deaths of her mother and brother.

The family members of Ganeshan and Mukhopadhyay also filed pleas before the court which were clubbed with Dass's petition.

The court would next hear the case Jan 29, 2013.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://twocircles.net/2012dec20/give_death_certificate_blast_victims_kin_court.html

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Update: 23 bodies recovered, 32 still missing in Somalia boat capsize


Fifty-five Somalis and Ethiopians have drowned or are missing after their boat capsized off Somalia in the worst such disaster in the area in almost two years, the United Nations says.

The UN refugee agency said on Thursday the incident represents "the biggest loss of life" in the Gulf of Aden since February 2011, when 57 Somali refugees and migrants from the Horn of Africa drowned while attempting to reach Yemen.

"Twenty-three bodies have been recovered. The 32 remaining passengers are presumed to have drowned," UNHCR said.

At least five people survived Tuesday's accident.

The boat was overcrowded and capsized just 15 minutes after leaving the port of Bosasso in Somalia's northern semi-autonomous state of Puntland on Tuesday.

Some 100,000 people have crossed the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden this year, despite warnings about the risks such trips involve, the agency said.

In addition to using unseaworthy and overcrowded boats, those fleeing the Horn of Africa often fall prey to unscrupulous smugglers, in whose hands they can face exploitation, extortion and even death, the agency warned.

It said 95 people have drowned or gone missing in the waters between Somalia and Yemen this year.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/dead-or-missing-in-somalia-boat-capsize/story-fn3dxix6-1226541536069

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Fewer aviation accidents in 2012


In 2012, a total of 407 people lost their lives in aircraft accidents worldwide. That is considerably less than the annual average of 820 deaths over the past 10 years, according to preliminary data of the NLR Air Transport Safety Institute (NLR-ATSI).

2012 was a good year regarding aviation safety, with 101 accidents involving commercial aircraft reported worldwide, of which 13 had fatal consequences for the people onboard. Over the past ten years, 130 accidents per year occurred on average, of which 27 resulted in fatalities.

These figures pertain to commercial aircraft weighing more than 5.7 tons. As in previous years, the number of fatal accidents in Africa (5) was relatively high in relation to the very modest traffic volumes. No fatal accident with a commercial aircraft operation was reported in Europe.

Runway excursions were the most frequent reported accident type in 2012 (26%). This share has increased over the last few years.

In 2012, the largest aviation disaster occurred in Nigeria where a MD83 of DANA Air crashed during an emergency landing at Lagos airport, killing 163 people (including 10 people on the ground). Another major accident occurred at the airport of Islamabad, in Pakistan, where a B737-200 of Bhoja Air crashed during landing killing 127 people.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://www.nlr-atsi.nl/news/fewer-accidents-in-2012.html

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Update: Flash floods kill 25 in Sri Lanka, 36 still missing


Flash floods have killed at least 25 people in Sri Lanka and left more than a quarter of a million marooned in their homes, disaster officials say.

Heavy rains, which have battered the island for much of the week, were still being reported in 14 of Sri Lanka's 25 administrative districts, with the central highlands - one of the world's key tea producing regions - the worst hit.

Sarath Lal Kumara, the deputy director of the Disaster Management Centre, said on Thursday that 25 people were now known to have died and a further 36 remained missing.

Most of the deaths were due to landslides engulfing homes.

The disaster management centre said more than 265,000 people had been cut off in their homes by the floods and thousands more had either sought refuge with relatives and friends or else been given emergency shelter.

"We have housed some 18,845 people from over 5,000 families in 102 relief camps", Kumara said.

Many of the evacuations took place in the central district of Matale after authorities declared it a danger zone over landslide fears.

Bhadra Kamaladasa, the director general of irrigation, said that around half of the country's 71 main reservoirs were overflowing.

In the west coastal town of Chilaw at least five fishermen had gone missing. The main motorway and the town were under six feet of flood water, police said.

The Railway Department announced the disruption of several key services as the tracks remained submerged.

The floods are some of the worst in Sri Lanka since early 2011 when unusually heavy monsoon rains left at least 64 people dead and drove more than one million people out of their homes.

Thursday 20 December 2012

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/flash-floods-kill-25-in-sri-lanka/story-e6frfkui-1226541398385#ixzz2FbxK01t6

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Five killed in China as bus falls into ravine


At least five people were killed and 27 injured after a bus fell into a ravine in China's Sichuan province Thursday, authorities said.

The accident occurred in the morning after a bus broke through a guardrail and fell into the 47-metre-deep ravine in the Daxian county, Xinhua quoted provincial administration as saying.

Two of the 32 people aboard the bus were killed at the accident site, two died on way to hospital and one died at the hospital. The 27 others were hospitalised.

Roads in China are known to be among the most dangerous in the world with more than 70,000 fatalities in 2009 alone. Many accidents are the result of drivers violating traffic laws, bad road conditions and overloaded vehicles.

In late February, fifteen people were killed when a tourist bus plunged into a ravine along State Highway 207 in the county-level city of Gaoping, which is located in north China’s Shanxi province. Nineteen people were injured, eight of them seriously, according to the Chinese government.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/china-bus-ravine_n_1611540.html?utm_hp_ref=world

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Sudan bus collision kills 33


Thirty-three people were killed and 24 injured when two inter-city buses collided in Sudan late Wednesday, in one of the country's worst road accidents in years, police said.

The crash between a full-sized passenger bus and a minibus occurred near the small community of El Kamlien, about halfway between Khartoum and Wad Medani.

"The minibus tried to overtake another vehicle and then collided with the bus," which was traveling in the opposite direction, a police statement said.

Deadly road accidents, often involving buses, are relatively common in Sudan, where driving skills are poor.

The latest follows complaints by city bus drivers in Khartoum that Sudan's surging inflation and sinking currency have driven maintenance costs out of control.

In October, 13 people died and 26 were injured when a passenger bus blew a tyre and collided with a minibus on the road to Wad Medani southeast of the capital, official media reported at the time.

Twenty-one people died in April 2009 when a bus and a truck collided south of Khartoum.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://english.sina.com/world/2012/1219/540051.html

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39 more bodies identified from DNA sampling


Thirty-nine of the 53 workers killed Tazreen Fashions fire and buried unnamed could be identified from DNA sampling of their relatives.

Fourteen of the victims were yet to be identified. One hundred and twelve workers were killed in the Tazreen Fahsions fire at Ashulia on November 24.

The forensic department of Dhaka Medical College Hospital sent a letter to the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters’ Association on December 12 confirming the identity of the 39 fire victims after matching their DNA samples with their relatives.

BGMEA vice-president Md Siddiqur Rahman, however, said that he did not know anything of it as the labour directorate and the DMCH were dealing with the matter.

Siddiqur said that the BGMEA would pay compensation to the families after the families were identified by matching DNA with their relatives and verification of the people by local administrations.

SM Mannan Kochi, another vice-president of the association, also said, ‘I am not aware of this matter.’

The 53 workers, burnt beyond recognition, were buried in the Jurain graveyard in Dhaka on November 27 under an arrangement of Anjuman Mufidul Islam.

A Criminal Investigation Department team along with forensic experts on November 26 collected samples from unidentified bodies for DNA matching.

After the fire, the BGMEA opened two information cells at Ashulia and at the BGMEA office so that families who had not found their relatives working with Tazreen after the fire could have their DNA sampled and matched against the samples collected from the dead bodies.

BGMEA source said that reports of DNA sampling and matching for the 14 victims would be completed soon.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://newagebd.com/detail.php?date=2012-12-19&nid=33832#.UNKFOBHgc35

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Update: Sri Lanka mass grave unearths ghosts from troubled past


A mass grave unearthed in Sri Lanka has stirred memories of the country's bloody insurgencies and sparked calls for an official inquiry in the island nation that has drawn global scrutiny for its chequered human rights record.

At a building site near a hospital in Matale, a central town 142 km (88 miles) from the capital, Colombo, excavators have found the skeletons, or parts of the skeletons, of at least 59 people.

It is possible they died of natural causes many years ago but in a country rocked by two different insurgencies beginning in the early 1970s, the assumption many people are jumping to is that they are some of the forgotten victims of the violence in which more than 150,000 people were killed.

Ajith Jayasena, the judicial medical officer at the hospital adjacent to the site, is keeping an open mind.

"We can't exactly say when they have been buried. These could be missing people," Jayasena said, using a euphemism for victims of political violence.

"It is better if we can investigate this thoroughly. That is the most important question," he said, referring to when they were buried.

Politicians and officials have called for an investigation by a government under pressure from the United Nations to address human rights problems and the deaths of thousands of civilians during the final months of a three-decade war with ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009.

The government has been widely condemned by human rights organisations for failing to properly investigate alleged war crimes. It rejects all accusations of rights violations.

But there are also questions about much earlier troubles.

Marxist rebels of the Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna (JVP), or People's Liberation Front, launched an insurrection in 1971. The rag-tag rebels seized some parts of the island before being crushed.

In the late 1980s, the group launched a second phase of its insurrection. The security forces responded ruthlessly and many rebels or suspected rebels were killed or disappeared.

The war against Tamil separatists begin in 1983 and was mostly fought in Tamil areas in the north and east. The insurgencies were suppressed by the government with both heavy loss of life and numerous accusations of rights abuses.

The United Nations said in March in a report on disappearances, that, in all, more than 5,600 people were unaccounted for in Sri Lanka.

Sectioned off with yellow crime-scene tape, the 125 square-metre (1,350 square foot) site for a bio-gas plant where the bones were found is under 24-hour police guard. The judicial medical officer and police are overseeing the excavation.

Residents of Matale, a hilly farming area, have their suspicions about who lies under their rust-coloured soil.

"We believe this is from the 1989-era insurgency," said one of the residents who gathered near the site to have a look. He was referring to the second phase of the JVP insurrection.

"There was an army unit one kilometre away towards the town," said the resident, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

But other residents said the bodies could have been people killed in a landslide in the 1940s or a smallpox epidemic around the same time.

Police spokesman Priyashantha Jayakody said it was too early to say.

Unearthed skeletons not yet examined lay covered with white plastic sheets. Some bodies were buried individually while others were jumbled together, a hospital worker who has been at the site since the dig started on November 27 said.

Human rights group Amnesty International called for a thorough investigation.

"Other mass graves in Sri Lanka have uncovered the remains of victims of alleged enforced disappearances and exhumations have not always been carried out with the necessary care," said Polly Truscott, the group's deputy Asia-Pacific director.

The JVP, which transformed itself from a rebel group into a political party, also called for an inquiry.

"This incident should not be allowed to be buried in time and forgotten," the JVP said in a statement.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news/international/Sri_Lanka_mass_grave_unearths_ghosts_from_troubled_past.html?cid=34543378

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Identifying War Victim's Remains


The bones of a young man in his twenties rest on a metal table in the Bosnian town of Tuzla. He has no name, but the International Commission on Missing Persons hopes to give him one soon.

The skeletal remains of this young man were found in three different graves around the town of Srebrenica. Differing soil environments have turned the bones into three distinct shades of brown.

He was one of more than 7,000 people, mostly men and boys, who were killed in the Srebrenica area in July 1995, after the town was taken by Bosnian Serb forces.

How this particular individual was killed is still a mystery. Most of his skull is missing, and while there is damage to the pelvic bone, forensic experts suggest this could have been caused by the heavy machinery used to dig up and rebury bodies.

After the mass killings, bodies were thrown into mass graves at sites outside Srebrenica. But as news of the massacre and other atrocities began trickling out, Bosnian Serb security forces used bulldozers to dig up bodies, then relocated them to secondary, even tertiary grave sites with the intention of covering up all traces. Around Srebrenica – and across Bosnia and Hercegovina generally – a grisly landscape of join-the-dot grave sites was created. The perpetrators of these crimes hoped the connections would never be made, the bodies never found.

But they were found, and not only those from the Srebrenica massacre, but others from atrocities all over the former Yugoslavia. Since the International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, was established in 1996, it has helped account for nearly 70 per cent of the more than 40,000 individuals who went missing during conflicts in the region.

The graves reveal bodies of differing ages, sex, nationality and ethnicity, in various states of intactness. The hope is that through forensic science and research, all of them will give up their harrowing secrets.

ICMP, with other regional organisations and investigators, works to tell these victims’ stories as best it can, using DNA mapping and other techniques. Thousands of victims have been given back their names, and returned to families who have waited years to learn their fate.

The path taken to identify each set of remains is a complex one, a physical and emotional journey only made possible by advanced scientific method.

MATCHING RECORDS TO REMAINS

ICMP’s headquarters in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo are unassuming, tucked in beside a stretch of highway overpass. This part of town, like many others, is overrun with stray dogs, but look up, and you have extraordinary views of the misty hills surrounding the city.

The foundations of ICMP were laid at a 1996 G7 summit, spearheaded by President Bill Clinton. ICMP began its operations in the former Yugoslavia, and the focus of its work remains primarily there. However, US Secretary of Defence Colin Powell later approached the institution to see whether its work could be applied to other regions. Since then, it has worked in Latin America, Africa and Iraq, also offering assistance after natural disasters like the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2005.

“Our approach is very rule of law,” ICMP director general Kathryne Bomberger told IWPR. “It’s all about governments taking responsibility for these cases.”

The approach is complicated not just by the slow-moving wheels of post-conflict governments, but also by the fact that the alleged perpetrators of human rights abuses may still be in power.

In the Balkans, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, in The Hague played an instrumental role in forcing national governments to accept accountability.

“We’re very much in line with this thinking where perpetrators are held accountable,” Bomberger said.

Away from the international stage, ICMP is closely involved with victims’ relatives, often the most important players in missing persons cases.

“Engagement of families is critical,” Bomberger said. “They may not be experts, but they have a right to participate…. It also builds trust between those who were victims of the previous regime and the new state.”

Bosnia has introduced legislation to allow relatives to assert their rights, for example an agreement that establishes the Missing Persons Institute, MPI. With ICMP providing oversight as an umbrella organisation, MPI conducts actual exhumations on the ground in Bosnia.

“What the law does is create this institution [MPI] that the government can use to work on these cases,” Bomberger explained. “It also allows families of the missing to assert their right to know the fate of a missing person.”

After almost two decades of work, ICMP has helped close nearly 17,000 cases, 14,000 of them relating to Bosnia.

ICMP spends a large amount of time scouring records as well as the physical landscape. The former Yugoslavia offers breathtaking scenes of remote villages tucked inside mountain valleys with rivers flowing with crystalline water, but it also holds dark secrets. Nearly 40,000 people are believed to have gone missing during the wars of former Yugoslavia in the Nineties. Close to 30,000 of them relate to Bosnia.

As for those missing persons cases that are still unsolved, Bomberger says they will be difficult to close.

“We’re still finding people missing from World War II and World War I. We had several cases where people were looking for their missing children from the last conflict, and we found their fathers missing from World War II.”

TRACING GRAVE LOCATIONS

Eyewitness information can help locate grave sites, but it can also present its own problems.

Ian Hanson, deputy director of forensic science for archaeology and anthropology at the ICMP, recalls one grave which yielded up German dog tags and paraphernalia from 50 years ago, rather than from the Bosnian conflict.

“What probably happened was when they reconstructed the road in the 1980s, they hit a World War II grave and stuff was just bulldozed to the side,” Hanson said. “So somebody says something about bones in a particular place, and it connects with somebody else. Sometimes the witness information is just not accurate.”

During the fighting around Srebrenica, the US military used U2 reconnaissance aircraft to take a constant stream of photographs of the terrain. As the US delegate to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright – later Secretary of State – used these pictures as evidence to persuade the international community that Bosnian Serb forces were holding prisoners and digging what looked like mass graves.

“The soil gets spread about and reflects light better,” Hanson explained, pointing to photographs taken during the war. An area where earth has clearly been disturbed – reflecting sunlight more than other territory – is surrounded by the tracks left by heavy machinery on the move.

While the wartime imagery yielded the most significant results, new aerial pictures can pick up unusual features that were missed first time round things, or that have become visible because of changes in the landscape.

The discovery of mass graves – especially at Srebrenica – has helped investigators account for significant numbers of missing people. But most graves in the former Yugoslavia contain far fewer remains – sometimes those of one to five individuals.

Finding these smaller sites is more difficult, but not impossible. One method is to look for unusual biological features.

“Some species of plant like disturbed soil,” Hanson said. “So you get an anomaly in the field you can identify on the ground, because you get a blocky look to the vegetation.”

While vegetation changes over time, the presence of a grave may still be detectable.

“You can see stuff, especially in crop fields, because the grave has changed the environment,” Hanson says. “There may be different nutrient levels so young crops might grow faster.”

The search teams look at relative nitrogen and chlorophyll levels in plants, and use infrared imagery to spot abnormalities. They then use LIDAR – radar and laser scanning – to verify a potential site.

Under the watchful gaze of local prosecutors, a team of specialists sets about excavating the site. Mine clearance specialists may be brought in to clear away wartime munitions scattered in the area. As human remains are found, they are collected, stored, and eventually shipped to mortuaries. Then the experts start trying to compile a picture of their identities and how they died.

PIECING TOGETHER A RECORD

Remains from Srebrenica are sent to Tuzla in the northwestern corner of Bosnia and Hercegovina. It is a two-hour drive through the mountains, along a winding highway on which drivers play a game of hazard with slower-moving cars, tour buses and logging trucks.

While the route offers unmatched views of pine-covered mountains, it also bears the scars of war. Sections of forest are cordoned off so that wartime shells and mines can be cleared, and many village buildings are still pockmarked with holes.

ICMP’s Podrinje Identification Project, or PIP, and its Identification Coordination Division both have facilities in Tuzla. For remains exhumed from a clandestine grave near Srebrenica, the next step is PIP, which was set up specifically to deal with victims of the Srebrenica massacre.

Emina Kurtalic, project manager at PIP, stands in the middle of the facility’s mortuary. Rows and rows of sturdy wooden shelves hold plastic-wrap body parts – sometimes just a skull or single limbs, very rarely an entire body.

The temperature never rises above four degrees Celsius. The musty scent of earth and flesh permeates the chill. Before the facility was set up, bodies were placed in nearby salt mines to preserve them.

Because the initial mass graves were dug up and their contents dumped at newly-dug sites in the months after the 1995 massacre, body parts from one individual may be found at four or more grave sites located kilometres apart, Kurtalic said.

“We have around 1,000 body bags,” Kurtalic said. “But those are not 1,000 persons. Those are cases which later on might be linked together. There’s a chance that one person is in several places in this room.”

Before DNA testing began being used in Bosnia in 2001, PIP scientists had to rely heavily on visual evidence.

“We started by taking only cases in which we had some very unique characteristics,” Kurtalic said. “Prostheses, implants, amputations – anything that could be totally recognisable by family members. Anomalies on the body.”

During this early period, ICMP helped publish two “catalogues” containing photos of clothing and belongings recovered with human remains. Flipping through the book makes grim viewing – crumpled shirts dyed brown by the earth, rusted belt buckles and jewellery, decaying shoes and shrunken hats.

“More than 4,000 families all over Bosnia were looking through these two books trying to recognise anything,” Kurtalic said. “Going over every page.”

These identification methods sometimes led to mistaken identification.

“In a very short period of time, family members gave us a lot of multiple recognitions,” Kurtalic says. “People in Srebrenica were surrounded for three years. They didn’t have a chance to change or buy clothing.” [not sure what this means: multiple recognitions confirming one person, or different people giving different identifications of the same person? And what is the significance of the clothing – why would it make it harder or easier to identify/misidentify?]

Identification using personal ID cards can also be unreliable. Fathers might be carrying the ID cards for all their family members, while some people might have used someone else’s card in an attempt to hide their identity.

Relatives might recognise handmade repairs and stitches on items of clothing. But even this no guarantee of accuracy, as those trying to flee sometimes took clothing from the dead.

Footwear delivered by aid organisations proved an obstacle to recognition because the pattern was so uniform. “Thousands of the same – totally identical shoes just in two colours: black and brown,” Kurtalic explained.

Today, clothing from victims of Srebrenica sits in brown paper bags on the top shelf inside the morgue.

Across the hall from the morgue, pathologists and anthropologists examine bodies individually. The usual cause of death is gunshot wounds, but signs of beatings are also common.

Bone samples are taken from remains, using larger bones or teeth. On the young man whose bones rest on the table inside the room, staff have cut a short section from the femur.

The samples are packaged and sent to the Identification Coordination Division, or ICD, located nearby.

If you walked into the ICD’s premises, you might never guess there was important work going on inside. Outside, teenagers hang around in leather coats, texting friends and canoodling on benches. Inside, the building resounds with the squeals and thuds of basketball. It is in fact a sports centre, in which ICMP rents office space.

At the ICD, bone samples from the dead and blood samples from living relatives of victims arrive and are entered onto a database. The facility also houses a small laboratory where bone samples are prepared. Technicians decontaminate them, wash them in a bleach solution, and rinse them in alcohol and water.

Once the samples have been thoroughly cleaned, they are broken down into a fine powder and sent to Sarajevo for the next step –DNA extraction.

“In the very first year [of its use], DNA showed itself as the only possibly secure way to do the identifications,” says Kurtalic. She points to a chart in PIP’s corridor that shows very few identifications before 2001, the year ICMP began using DNA analysis in Bosnia. Afterwards the graph shows a remarkable leap.

So far, 6,054 victims of Srebrenica have been officially identified. Another 900 cases are waiting to be closed for various reasons. Families might be waiting until more of a body is found, or they may be holding on until July 2013, when the next burial of Srebrenica victims takes place on the anniversary of the massacre.

MATCHING THE DEAD WITH LIVING RELATIVES

DNA testing labs in Sarajevo can process up to 105 bone samples a day, in what ICMP describes as a sort of assembly line.

“DNA is a very democratic tool,” Bomberger said. “It’s not just about building a lab. It’s about using very advanced technology and being scientific and honest and accountable.”

Inside the lab, the crushed bone goes through a two-day process where the powder is demineralised and its cells broken down to release DNA. The material is used to build up a DNA profile of the deceased.

“The state of DNA that’s found in bone samples varies quite a bit,” says Ana Bilic, the deputy head of the DNA lab in Sarajevo. “You’re never really sure how much of this DNA you’re able to extract.”

Once that DNA profile has been established, it is sent back to ICD to be compared with the profiles of relatives of missing persons, in hope of matching them up. It may also help scientists confirm that different body parts belong to the same individual, a process known as “reassociation”.

Relatives of missing persons can submit blood samples for DNA profiling either direct to mobile MPI teams, or by using commercially available kits where blood is drawn from the finger much as a diabetes monitor does, and the result sent in by mail.

So far over 90,000 blood samples have been collected from the relatives of 30,000 missing individuals.

The basic technique is called “kinship analysis”, an attempt to match a deceased person’s DNA to that of possible surviving relatives.

Nuclear DNA, inherited from both parents, is the first route to identification.

“Ideally, the closer the relative, the more information the DNA gives,” Bilic said. “So we like to look at the father and mother of the missing person, or even the children of the missing person.”

GIVING MEANING AND DIGNITY TO HUMAN STORIES

ICMP staff say they never forget the human stories behind the scientific work they are engaged in. At times, those carrying out exhumations or lab analysis make an especially personal connection with human tragedy.

“It’s often objects,” Hanson explained. “It’s things that make people reflect on themselves and their own relationships. Maybe there’s an ID card and a date of birth, and the [exhumation] worker has the same date of birth as the victim, or there’s a wedding ring on the finger bone. It’s often objects that personalise a body rather than the bones themselves.”

Hanson recalls a particular case where a grave was found at the bottom of a valley that had been waterlogged periodically over the years.

“When we went to excavate them, there was very good preservation of tissue to the point where you could actually recognise people,” Hanson says. “Finding people’s tattoos you can still read, or specific body positions in graves which can give more information about how they died – those are the things you remember.”

In the end, families have the final call on whether to confirm an identification. If they only have part of the remains, an arm or a leg, they may feel this is inadequate for a formal burial.

Although two decades have passed since the Balkans conflicts, the healing process is barely begun.

“I think we have to ask ourselves a lot of questions regarding what it takes exactly to help rebuild societies,” Bomberger said. “To help reconcile people, to help build peace and security – that’s our ultimate goal, peace and security.”

“What we’re doing is not about keeping the country in the past,” she says. “I think we’re helping them reconcile and build a country based upon an honest reckoning with what happened in the past, rather than a distorted one that can be mythologised… and used for political ends. Dealing with the past honestly is an important ingredient for moving forward.”

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://www.groundreport.com/Politics/Bosnia-Identifying-War-Victims-Remains/2950132

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Update: 18 dead, 37 missing after boat capsizes in Puntland waters

The bodies of 18 people who drowned when their boat capsized were recovered at Lug Samatar channel on the outskirts of Bosaso and brought to Bosaso General Hospital on Tuesday (December 18th), officials told Sabahi.

There were about 60 people on board, mostly women, and a rescue operation is under way for 37 who are still missing, Puntland Deputy Minister of Health Saynab Ugas Yasin told Sabahi.

The 18 recovered bodies include two Oromos and 16 Somalis. A pregnant woman and an 11-year-old child were among the dead.

"Preliminary investigations show that most of the people drowned after the boat capsized, which is a tragic incident," Yasin said.

The Puntland regional administration said five survivors are being held for questioning about what led to this accident.

The Puntland administration has apprehended many human traffickers and warned citizens against the perils of illegal migration. However, this has not stopped many people from attempting the dangerous journey from Puntland to Yemen.

Wednesday 19 December 2012

http://sabahionline.com/en_GB/articles/hoa/articles/newsbriefs/2012/12/19/newsbrief-02

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Phuket and The Tsunami: It's Not Impossible to Get The Facts Straight


The Impossible' opens in US movie theatres on Friday, and it will spark renewed interest in the Indian Ocean tsunami and especially what happened to holidaymakers in Thailand.

Almost eight years on from the devastating wave that struck Phuket and other parts of the Andaman, news agencies still report that 2800 people were ''missing'' from the tsunami in Thailand.

Phuketwan would like to plead with Reuters, Associated Press, AFP and the other international news agencies to report the tsunami toll accurately, please.

The reason why Phuketwan can call out the big international news agencies and know with certainty that they have it wrong is that we checked the facts for ourselves.

We challenged the figures provided by the Thai Government on the first anniversary of the tsunami, and we proved they were wrong.

What's certainly true is that almost 5400 tourists, residents and Burmese construction workers perished when the wave swept in on December 26, 2004.

What's also true is that thousands of people were reported ''missing'' in the days after the tragedy.

However, the remarkable thing about the tsunami was the washing machine cycling of the currents after the big wave struck.

The circular motion took victims from one beach and deposited them at other beaches. It carried people from five-star hotels to where Burmese worker camps had been wrecked, it lifted villagers from their homes and dropped them in the jungle.

The result was that there were about 3000 unidentified bodies along Thailand's Andaman coast.

In reaction to the catastrophe, international teams from about 40 countries went to Phuket and began the process of identifying the bodies.

Most of those who remained ''missing'' were not ''missing'' at all. Their unnamed bodies had been found.

And gradually, as the days passed, the international group known as the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification unit gave them back their names.

By the end of the first year, the vast majority of the bodies had been identified. There was one small problem: few news organisations - apart from the Phuketwan team and the BBC - paid any attention.

The result? At the first anniversary commemoration on Phuket, when news organisations from all around the world sent reporters, a book was handed out containing the wrong tsunami toll details.

'One Year in Memory of Tsunami' states that the big wave killed 5395 people and left 2940 others still missing, 2023 of them Thais, plus 917 foreigners.

Another book 'Tsunami 2004 Nam Chai Thai,' combined dead and missing figures and reported: ''By adding the number of people registered as missing (2965) and assuming that they perished, the number of dead victims amounted to 8360.''

The truth is very different.

We know, because we checked with 14 embassies at the time - privacy conditions prohibited the release of an overall body count - and discovered the reality.

The South China Morning Post newspaper in Hong Kong published the report. You'd think that the world's news agencies would also check it out for themselves.

But no . . . eight years on, they still kill off more than 2000 people who were not killed. And in doing that, they continue to overlook the remarkable forensic achievements of the international body identification team.

We followed the wonderful identification process in the years after the tsunami as it brought closure to families around the world.

And we are able to say with certainty that there are not 2800 ''missing presumed dead'' victims of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.

There were 5395 people killed in Thailand by the tsunami.

As at December 2009, there were 444 people still listed as ''missing''. . . with 398 bodies of remaining unidentified victims still buried in a special cemetery north of Phuket.

It's believed a few more have been identified since then.

Within days of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Reuters reports, actress Naomi Watts took part in a fundraising telethon spearheaded by George Clooney to help the millions of people from Indonesia to the east coast of Africa whose lives were shattered.

With the launch of a film providing an accurate depiction of what took place in Thailand, perhaps it's finally time the toll was also reported factually.

Wednesday 20 December 2012

http://phuketwan.com/tourism/phuket-tsunami-impossible-facts-straight-17257/

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One Hundred Thousand Tamils Missing After Sri Lanka War


World Bank population data from Sri Lanka indicates up to a hundred thousand Tamils are unaccounted for after the final war against the Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009, raising questions about whether they could be dead.

A UN report cited a death toll of forty thousand for the climax of the war in 2009 but a UN internal inquiry last month acknowledged for the first time that up to seventy thousand civilian deaths were possible.

The leaked World Bank spreadsheets broken down by village for the north of the island estimate numbers of returnees to the former conflict area in mid 2010. The Bank also cites Statistical Handbook Numbers for population in 2007 - before the fighting intensified. The two sets of data reveal 101,748 people missing from Mullaitivu District - the area that bore the brunt of the final fighting. This is the equivalent of 28,899 households. This number has been confirmed to me by the World Bank, though they add "other interpretations about the population data that are not included in the document can not be attributed to the World Bank".

A similar conclusion about the missing population can be drawn when comparing the 2010 World Bank data with census numbers from 2006. The latter were the result of a joint government and rebel head count in the area.

Sceptics might argue the 2006 figures were probably exaggerated by the Tigers and local officials close to them in order to secure more aid. However exactly the same argument could be made for inflating numbers in 2010, which were similarly used for allocating aid.

It's also not clear if the 2010 World Bank resettlement estimates include the 11,000 Tamil combatants held in detention at that point - or many thousands of Tamils who bribed their way out of the internment camp and escaped to southern India. It's also possible some of the missing Tamils settled elsewhere in the island but unlikely very large numbers because they do not appear elsewhere in the northern provinces judging by the Bank's own data. The onus is now on the Sri Lankan government to explain why huge numbers of people appear to be missing from their own population data.

"I lost count of how many bodies I buried in 2009," says Murugan, a Tamil fisherman from Sri Lanka now in France, with a scar under his right eye from fighting for the naval wing of the Tamil Tigers. "I just keep seeing the bodies of babies just four or five months old, their limbs and heads and body parts spread all over the place," he says, tormented by nightmares.

By the climax of Sri Lanka's conflict in 2009, hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were penned into a tiny spit of sandy land along the eastern coast, living in squalid makeshift encampments, starving, exhausted and under fire from the Sri Lankan military. Rebel fighters like Murugan couldn't go out to sea to fight in their gunboats because they were hemmed in, so these burly men were ordered to dispose of the bodies as quickly as possible before they started to rot in the tropical heat. They had experience - after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami Sea Tigers pulled out the rotting limbs from the marshes.

By late January 2009 the corpses started mounting up as the army shelled a safe zone it had demarcated for civilians and hundreds of thousands of people fled under fire towards the coast. "I saw a river full of dead bodies. I can't describe it. It was as if a tsunami had come again but this time inland," says Murugan.

In March in a small coastal village called Puttumattalan where a hundred thousand people had taken shelter, Murugan says he was ordered to bury 700 people who died trying to cross over the lagoon to the army side at night. "I think the army must have thought they were Tigers advancing on them and they were all killed near the edge of the water," he says.

It took five or six days to dispose of all the corpses. Murugan had to erect a fence to block the view of the Sri Lankan snipers on the other side of the water so he could bring in an earthmover to scoop up the dead without being shot at.

"We just dropped the bodies in ditches because there were so many. It was the worst thing in the world. They were all sorts - men, women and kids. More women than men, but children of all ages. Sometimes even now I think of committing suicide. It was terrible. It was like a crematorium, bodies and more bodies and blood everywhere. Till I die I will never forget what I saw there".

Murugan's account is consistent with testimony from many other survivors, who describe a nightmarish place. Many have stories of climbing out of their primitive bunkers after a night of relentless shelling only to find the dismembered body parts of their neighbours strewn about.

Today the scale of the tragedy in 2009 in that tiny corner of Sri Lanka is not known. The Sri Lankan government excluded international aid workers and independent journalists from the war zone, making reliable information hard to come by. We now know a UN data collection team received unconfirmed reports of fifty thousand deaths and injuries during the war but by the final weeks it was impossible to count bodies. Wikileaks cables reveal the UN came to a very rough estimate of between 7,000-17,000 people missing presumed dead in the final week of fighting in May 2009.

By then the makeshift hospital had ceased functioning, leaving the injured to die. Already the survival rate had dropped drastically; people were exhausted, their reserves depleted. Medicine and food were desperately short. On May 10th a Catholic priest wrote to the Pope saying there had been 3318 dead the night before and 4000 injured. On the final day of the war another Catholic priest told me he'd seen thousands of bodies lying about as he left the war zone. I questioned him about whether he meant hundreds and he repeated thousands.

Nearly four years on there is no agreed death toll, even to the nearest ten thousand lives. That's why an international investigation is required to establish the truth about what may be one of the least reported but worst atrocities of recent decades - both in terms of the speed and the scale of the killing.

Wednesday 19 December 2012

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/frances-harrison/one-hundred-thousand-peop_b_2306136.html

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Five missing children feared drowned


Five children are feared dead in River Yala, Siaya County after a canoe they were using to cross the water mass capsized. A local, aged 34, who attempted to rescue the children is also missing.

Richard Ochieng, 13, Walter Otieno, 13, Paskal Omulo, 13, Dadi Nyangwena, seven, and two others went missing after being swept away by the river on Tuesday evening.

The families of the missing boys are camping at bridge separating Alego Seje and Yimbo areas that is about half a kilometre from their homes.

James Ogare, the father to Ochieng said it he was pained by the incident, adding that he hoped the body of his son would be found.

Over 300 locals were last evening making efforts to retrieve the bodies, of the victims.

The five were crossing the river while herding from grazing fields, about a half kilometre away from their homes.

North Yimbo Location Chief, Vicklice Rabut, said the missing boys routinely took the herd of cattle across the river in Alego to graze. After it stopped raining, they decided to cross the river he explained.

Rabut said on the way back, their canoe was swept by the river that was flowing at high speed following heavy downpour. He noted that the animals managed to cross to the opposite side.

The chief appealed to the Government and well-wishers to help the families retrieve the bodies.

He said if the bodies are not found soon, they may be moved to Lake Victoria, making it difficult to find them.

“In case they are not retrieved soon the bodies would also get to under the reeds which may then make it very difficult remove them,” said Rabut.

Wednesday 20 December 2012

http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000073271&story_title=Kenya-Five-missing-children-feared-dead

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