Monday 25 February 2013

Thames Valley Police making progress on mystery bodies


Investigations into eight unidentified bodies across the Thames Valley have generated inquiries across Europe, Canada and England.

Thames Valley Police's Operation Nightingale was launched in December into cases dating back to 1970.

In January, the force was contacted by a Canadian relative of a tailor whose distinctive Derbyshire-made jacket was found on a body in Berkshire in 1979.

Donnington Operation Nightingale artist's impression An artist's impression of the man found near Newbury in 1979

Two of the other eight cases have led to appeals in Poland and Albania.

A number of calls have been received from Derbyshire in connection with the case of a man in his 60s, discovered in a disused shed in Donnington, near Newbury in March 1979.

He was wearing a single-breasted jacket from tailor JW Marples, which were principally sold to the farming community and possibly made in Chesterfield or Bakewell.

Thames Valley Police distributed around 200 flyers at the Bakewell cattle market and around the local community.

Det Con Alison Brown, from the force's major crime review team, also made an appeal on BBC Radio Derby for information leading to the man's identity.

Concealed inside lorry

Investigations into the death of a man on the northbound carriageway of the M40 in Oxfordshire in January 2000 are focusing on Oxford's Albanian community.

Dorney Operation Nightingale artist's impression Appeals to trace the man found near Eton have been made in Poland

Police believe the man, aged between 17 and 30, may have been an illegal immigrant from Kosovo or Albania, who could have entered the country concealed inside a lorry.

Polish missing persons website Itaka, has been involved with investigations of another case near Eton in May 2004.

The body of a man, aged between 25 and 35, was found floating in the water of Jubilee River in Dorney, Buckinghamshire.

Police have requested Itaka to put the deceased's profile on their website and check their records for a possible identity.

Det Con Alison Brown said: "We would welcome any information regardless of how small or insignificant you think it may be to try and help identify these men."

Monday 25 February 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-21522896

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North Korea's 18 state sanctioned female hairstyles, men get 10


Men and women in North Korea may not be able to cut their hair in trendy, new styles, as the country has launched a campaign allowing women to choose from 18 different “officially sanctioned” hairstyles, while men get to choose from just 10.

It was sparked by communist officials wanting to forbid western influences. The 18 hairstyles women can choose from don’t have much variety, most being short bobs or unstyled medium-length hair.

Usually, women are encouraged to wear their hair straight with traditional Korean dress, but if they wear western clothes, they can wear their hair wavy or curled.

The hairstyles change for married women, too. When a woman is married, it’s frowned upon to wear longer hair. But if a woman is single, she can be more creative with her hair and wear it long, in braids, or put a ribbon in it.

Residents of the country made a TV series in 2005 called “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.” It aimed to promote a certain type of male hairstyle which included a short length in the back and sides.

While this show aired, radio reports popped up all over North Korea urging people to wear tidy hairstyles and appropriate clothing.




The show escalated to send hidden cameras out to catch rebellious North Koreans who were breaking the hairstyle rules. They even began to name and publicly shame those who wore their hair differently.

According to Korean authorities, men should keep their hair shorter than five centimeters and cut it every 15 days.

When a man reaches an older age, he’s allowed to grow his hair up to seven centimeters.

Though the strict guidelines are still enforced, North Korea’s first lady Ri Sol-ju has shown she's more fashion forward, choosing two piece suits and slicked back hair instead of the traditional Korean dress and short bob.

Monday 25 February 2013

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/north-korean-women-encouraged-choose-18-official-hairstyles-men-get-10#

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Nigeria: Truck Kills Eight On Lagos-Ibadan Expressway


Eight persons died on Sunday along Ibadan-Lagos Expressway when the commercial vehicle conveying them rammed into a truck.

Witnesses say the crash, which occurred in Mowe area of the expressway, a stone throw to Redeemed Christian Church of God headquarters, was caused by the truck driver who was reversing on the highway.

The eight passengers, travelling in a space-wagon, were heading towards Lagos from Abeokuta, when the driver, already on a high speed, unexpectedly drove straight into the truck.

All eight passengers died on the spot of the accident, alongside the driver.

It took the accident rescue team almost an hour, before the corpses of the victims could be retrieved from the wreckage.

Other motorists and passengers plying the road who met the accident, could not hold back tears, as the battered bodies of the victims were being pulled from the car.

As at the time of this report, the number plate of the commercial vehicle had been removed, while the truck which caused the crash had been towed to the police station.

The corpses were deposited in the mortuary, as efforts were ongoing by the authorities to locate the families and relatives of the deceased.

Monday 25 February 2013

http://allafrica.com/stories/201302250274.html

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Whose bones made it home from the Vietnam War?


A mass grave was dug up this month dedicated to the crew of an EC-47Q reconnaissance plane at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri.

The electronic surveillance plane left Pleiku Airbase in the Republic of Vietnam Feb. 5, 1969. About 20 miles northwest of Chavanne, Laos, the crew made its last radio contact at 8:10 a.m. It missed a scheduled stop at noon, and a search began that's continued by family today.

The crash site in the Laotian jungle was first found that fall and analyses of the bones concluded they came from just five to seven men. Convinced the whole crew died in the crash, the military engraved 10 names in the granite headstone at Jefferson Barracks.

The U.S. military still cannot account for 1,654 Americans lost in the Vietnam conflict, and the remains of thousands more never have been recovered.

One Houston family is among those hoping the disinterred grave and DNA exemplars they provided to the military finally will let them know whose bones made it home.

"I would hope that I would find out definitely that my husband was indeed dead," said Cindy Burke, widow of Capt. Walter Burke. "I'm sure that after all this time he is, but I would like a final closure."

Although Jefferson Barracks has more than 500 mass graves, disinterments are rare. Only a handful have been dug up in the last few decades.

Paul Clever holds what he believes may be part of his father's flight vest. He recovered that along with other artifacts from the Laos crash site of his father's spy plane.

Military records show an officer closed the case in 1969 although a report submitted to him said the whole crew was not accounted for in the recovered remains.

In 1995, a recovery team searching for a different crash site found Walter's dog tag, promising Cindy in a 1996 letter that they would return it once a full dig was completed at the site. It's not clear why, but that never happened.

When the son of Sgt. Louis Clever, Paul, received a copy of the dog tag letter from Cindy's daughter, he contacted the Air Force Mortuary Affairs office. The chief of the Past Conflicts Branch found the dog tag in Hawaii, helped return it to the Burke family in November, and now is organizing the disinterment and DNA testing.

"A lot of years ago my mom felt dismissed, that they didn't value the situation and just wanted to be done with it," said Lauren Branch, Burke's daughter. "I think just telling her that he's not forgotten about, I think that meant a lot to her."

Without certainty about whose bones made it home - only one unmarried man was identified - none of the wives knew who might have survived the crash and who might one day come home. Uncertain, none remarried.

The families stitched together a semblance of sanity. The wives tried not to let questions about the crash consume them as they confronted the sudden challenge of being single mothers in an era when that wasn't a term.

Some of the crew's children have few memories of their fathers.

Lauren was just 4 years old when her father's plane was hit and a wing torn from its fuselage.

The return of her father's dog tag last year led to details about the crash she'd never known and which gave perspective to a sadness once without boundaries.

Her mother said she hopes the tests bring her additional closure, but remains upset about how the case was handled initially.

"A lot of things happened that should never have happened," she said.

Cyanide capsules

One crewman's family agreed to the disinterment even though they already know three teeth from Sgt. Clarence "Boone" McNeill are among the bones in the grave.

Using dental records, Boone was the only person identified in 1969. His brother, Walker McNeill of North Carolina, didn't learn about the identification until November.

"We were told that some of the remains had been identified but their policy was to notify only the family involved, so when we didn't hear anything we assumed that Boone was one of the crew members whose remains weren't identified," Walker said.

His mother died in 2006 believing her son was trapped in a Chinese prisoner camp. Walker and his brother Dan, now a four-star general in the Army, never told her they did not share her hope.

The last time Walker saw his brother, Clarence showed him a pill box with two cyanide capsules he had been directed to use if his plane crashed.

"My brother and I weren't surprised that the remains were Boone's because we had already accepted the fact he probably didn't make it," Walker said. "The funeral ceremony at Jefferson Barracks was closure for us."

DNA to be tested

Protesters cursed the families as they drove through the gates of Jefferson National Barracks for a funeral months after the crash.

Paul remembers clouds strangled the sun as Missouri dirt rained onto two off-white caskets.

He was 7 years old when the men in uniform came to the door and told his mother that his father was missing in action, lost.

Lost. That was a word young Paul understood. He lost a He-Man action figure once then found him. He wanted to tell the men and this mother, "I can find him!" They told him to go out and play.

In December, Paul and his wife searched the Laotian jungle for answers obscured by inaccurate GPS coordinates and four decades of growth. In a rocky river bed, they found a few small bones, shirt snap buttons, a ⅜ drive socket, mesh from a vest, a twisted sheet of the fuselage and other small remnants.

Paul revisited the Missouri grave site on a sunny day this month to watch 10,000 pounds of dirt lifted from atop the caskets.

The rotting wood shells held body bags filled with 30 pounds of bone, just one-tenth of the crew's full skeletal weight but more than enough for DNA tests. The testing could take up to a year, but family hopes for answers sometime this summer.

Paul wants to know whose bones made it home, but even if his DNA sample shows a familial match with those raised out of the ground, he said he won't feel closure.

"They say severe trauma changes you on the cellular level and I tend to believe that," Paul said. He plans to continue seeking answers about the military missteps that halted a full recovery and left families without answers for so long.

Cindy hopes the tests will bring closure, although it's tough to know what that will feel like after 44 years of waiting.

"It hurts to have all these old wounds opened up again," Cindy said. "After a while, you get to the point where you go on living. I had children to raise. I have grandchildren now. I'm going to be a great-grandmother for the first time.

"You know, right now we're on hold."

Monday 25 February 2013

Read more: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Whose-bones-made-it-home-from-the-Vietnam-War-4304680.php#ixzz2LuDo1jcG

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Hoping for closure, families bury unidentified dead


Five months after the Baldia factory blaze, the bodies of 17 unidentified victims were buried at the KMC graveyard near the Hub River Road on Sunday.

According to court orders, government officials had allotted a serial number to every body at the Edhi morgue so that when the DNA reports arrived, they could be identified. But the DNA reports never arrived.

“Seventeen coffins contain bodies. And one only body parts,” said Anwar Kazmi of the Edhi Foundation as volunteers put the sealed coffins in ambulances.

The coffins were taken to a ground in Baldia Town for the funeral rites and then to the government graveyard for burial.

The victims’ graves do not have tombstones with their names, but the serial numbers they were allotted.

The burial could have been carried out months ago if only the government had paid a little attention to the crisis, said Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of the Edhi Foundation.

“We live in a poverty-struck country. If people lose someone here, they mourn and protest to an extent. After that, they give up and move on. What else can they do?” he said.

Kader lost his younger brother in the fire. He was 17 years old and his body was never found. “My mother cried for months. But she has given up now. She has accepted that he is no more,” said Kader. “I can only hope that he is in one of these coffins.”

The elderly Muhammad Sharif lost his 21-year-old son Muhammad Hanif in the fire and is still waiting for the body. He has not been compensated as well.

Sharif attended the mass burial hoping that his son’s body was among the bodies of the unidentified victims.

He said Hanif had started working at the factory four months before the fire. Hanif also had a speech impairment.

Sharif had provided his DNA samples twice, but was told that the samples did not match any of the bodies at the mortuary.

His two daughters also have a speech impairment like their deceased brother. Sharif himself has some orthopaedic problems, which have rendered him unable to work.

He approached many government functionaries to be compensated as per the announcement, but was told he needed his son’s body before he could be compensated.

When Sharif approached the Saylani Welfare Trust and the Alamgir Welfare Trust, they assured him that they would provide his family with ration for a month.

Another victim Muhammad Akmal is survived by three minor sons: 10-year-old Hamza, eight-year-old Mubin and two-year-old Ahmed.

The sons also attended the mass burial wondering if they would ever see their father’s body. Akmal had been working at the factory as a supervisor and was employed there for eight years.

After the fire, his widow and their three sons have been waiting to identify his body, but the government has failed them.

They have not been paid a single paisa as compensation so far and their relatives have already spent between Rs40,000 and Rs50,000 on travelling and other expenses as per the government’s requirements for being compensated.

National Trade Union Federation Deputy General Secretary Nasir Mansoor said these affectees had faced a lot of difficulties during the lengthy and inhuman process.

He said the bodies buried on Sunday were unclaimed and there were still 25 to 30 victims’ families who had provided their DNA samples, but were not handed over the bodies.

He said that the government’s tenure would end soon and then the caretaker setup would take over, which would only focus on holding the elections and the fire victims’ issues would be forgotten.

A German delegation of trade unionists, led by Thomas Seibert, also attended the mass burial to express solidarity with the victims’ families.

On September 11 last year, a fire had erupted at Ali Enterprises and claimed the lives of around 300 workers.

The federal government, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and a noted builder had announced compensation for each affected family, but only those affectees were compensated who had identified the bodies.

Most victims were identified by their clothes or the contents of their pockets because their faces had been burnt beyond recognition. The 17 bodies buried on Sunday were kept at the Edhi morgue, as their DNA samples had been sent to Islamabad. Considering the delay in receiving the DNA reports, the court had ordered that the bodies be buried.

Monday 25 February 2013

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-4-161933-Hoping-for-closure-families-bury-unide

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