Wednesday 1 May 2013

Bangladesh: 32 unidentified bodies buried at Jurain graveyard


Thirty-two unidentified bodies retrieved from the debris of collapsed Rana Plaza were buried on Wednesday at Jurain graveyard, with the graves bearing the numbers corresponding to their DNA samples.

A century-old Islamic charity Anjuman-e-Mufidul Islam performed the last rites at the graveyard.

Executive Director of the charity Abul Kashem said they had dug 60 graves at Jurain.

Dhaka district’s Additional Magistrate Abul Fazal Mir told bdnews24.com the DNA samples of the bodies had been preserved, so that their identity could be confirmed through tests if anyone came claiming them later.

Executive Magistrate Rebeka Sultana said the DNA identity of 21 unidentified bodies kept in the Dhaka Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) morgue was matched on Wednesday noon. The body of a deceased, identified as a female readymade garment worker Hasina, was handed over to her relatives later.

Another body was kept at the hospital since two people had claimed it.

After the first namaz-e-janaza (funeral prayer) in front of the DMCH around 2pm, 19 unclaimed bodies were brought to the Jurain graveyard. Fourteen unclaimed bodies were brought there from the morgue of Salimullah Medical College and Hospital, also known as Mitford Hospital.

Of the 17 unidentified bodies kept at the Mitford Hospital, the identity of one female garment worker Sultana, 22, was confirmed at the last moment. Though the body was handed over to her relatives, two other bodies were kept at the morgue since they were claimed by several people.

Executive Magistrate Khadiza Begum said after the second funeral prayer of the victims at the graveyard, relatives of another female garment worker Fahima confirmed her identity. She was also buried at the graveyard after the last rites.

The process of burying the victims started at about 3pm.

Besides the locals, the relatives of those still missing since the collapse of the nine-storey commercial building Rana Plaza at Savar on Apr 24 gathered at the graveyard looking for the bodies of their loved ones.

Additional Magistrate Abul Fazal Mir said a total of 70 bodies recovered from the concrete rubbles were sent to the two hospital morgues. Of those, 35 were identified and handed over to their relatives. Three bodies were still at the hospital morgues because of several claims for them.

Meanwhile, five people injured in the country's worst-ever industrial disaster succumbed to their injuries while undergoing treatment at the DMCH, with one of them, Selim Rana of Panchagarh district, dying on Wednesday morning.

The authorities handed over the body to his brother Shahidul Islam.

Rescuers pulled out 18 more bodies from the debris of Rana Plaza in Savar as the rescue operation stepped into eighth straight day on Wednesday.

With the fresh recovery of bodies, the toll from the deadly building collapse now stands at 411, according to the Dhaka District control room, opened close to the site to provide information on the tragedy.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2013/05/01/32-bodies-buried-at-jurain-graveyard

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18 years since Croatian operation “Flash”


Wednesday marks 18th anniversary of the beginning of the Croatian military operation “Flash”, in which, by the data of the Documentary-informative center “Veritas”, 283 Serbs from western Slavonia were killed, and at least 15,000 people were expelled.

Among the murdered Serbs were 57 women and 9 children. According to the data of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, between 83 and 100 Serbian civilians were killed, and both NGOs point out that none of the Croats was trialed for the war crimes in the operation “Flash”.

According to the data from “Human Rights Watch”, after the “Flash” 1,500 Serbs were arrested, and many of them were taken to detention camps in Varazdin, Slavonska Pozega, Nova Gradiska and Bjelovar.

Due to the anniversary of the “Flash”, there will be a memorial service in the Church of Saint Mark in Belgrade, on the May 1, at 11 o’clock. Near the temple, on the commemorative plaque, the Association of the families of the missing “Tear” will lay flowers and wreaths for the Serbian victims.

In Gradiska, in Republic Srpska, where most of the refugees from west Slavonia lives, people will toss flowers from the Bridge of salvation and wreaths in Sava river, and in the church of the Holy Virgin in the city will be memorial service.

More than 160 well known burial sites in west Slavonia are not yet exhumed, and the identification process of the dead is going slowly. The last exhumation was done in December 2012, and identification was done in the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb, when remains of 17 Serbs were identified. The bodies dated to be from operation “Flash” and other Croatian operations in the area of west Slavonia from 1991. to 1995. In that period, tens of thousands of Serbs were expelled from west Slavonia.

Operation “Flash” lasted two days, and in that part of Slavonia, which was part of Republic Srpska Krajina (“Sector West” under the protection of UN), has entered more than 16,000 Croatian troops.

Wednesday 1 May 2015

http://inserbia.info/news/2013/04/18-years-since-croatian-operation-flash-on-may-1-2013/

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Slaughterhouse of Sotin: Mass grave found in Croatia finally solves mystery of people who were taken away in the middle of night by Serbs


Ten bodies of people taken away in the dead of night and killed during the earliest part of the Yugoslavian wars have been discovered in a mass grave near a slaughterhouse.

It is hoped the find finally solves the mystery of Sotin, a Croatian village near Vukova.

Thirteen residents of the village were killed by Serbs during the night on December 26, 1991

Croatia’s deputy war veterans minister Bojan Glavasevic said that remains of ten people, believed to belong to those taken, had been exhumed from a mass grave

It comes after three bodies were discovered elsewhere in the village last week.

Glavasevic said it was probable that the ten bodies had been moved in 1997 from the grave discovered last week.

They had been buried in a trench used for disposing of animal remains next to an abattoir, and the human remains were mixed with animal particles.

The find comes after a collaborative investigation by the Zagreb and Belgrade authorities.

After 22 years this is seen as the first indication of official cooperation between the Government of Croatia and the Serbian authorities on the issue of missing persons.

In February, an investigation was launched against several wartime Serb fighters. Authorities were investigating the killing of 16 Croatian civilians in Sotin from October 1991 until the end of the year, Balkan Insight reports.

Two former police and territorial defence officers in Sotin, Zarko Milosevic and Dragan Loncar, were arrested on war crimes charges on February 4.

The prosecutor in Belgrade told Balkan Insight: 'Milosevic and Loncar, together with other members of the police and territorial defence forces, arrested more than ten civilians and detained them at the police station.

'On December 26, 1991, they put them in an army truck and took them to an unknown location and killed them with automatic weapons.'

During the war, 64 people in total were killed in the small village, which lies east of Vukovar.

Vukovar, dubbed 'Croatia's Stalingrad' because of the devastation wrought on it in the attack, fell to the Yugoslav Army and Serb fighters in November 1991 after a devastating siege. Prisoners of war sought refuge in a hospital.

When the city fell, Serbian troops seized the prisoners. At least 200 were taken to a pig farm in Ovcara two miles away and beaten, tortured and then killed. Their bodies were also found in mass graves.

This is the fifth case that Serbia’s war crime prosecutor has launched over alleged war crimes around Vukovar.

The previous four cases related to crimes committed at the Ovcara farm.

Serbian courts have so far found 15 people guilty of war crimes in Vukovar and sentenced them to a total of 207 years in prison.

The Yugoslav Army and Serbian paramilitary units besieged Vukovar for three months in 1991.

It followed Croatia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, and thousands of non-Serbs were expelled when the town was captured.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317590/Slaughterhouse-Sotin-Mass-grave-Croatia-finally-solves-mystery-people-taken-away-middle-night-Serbs.html

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Libya: IDing War Victims


For most of 2011, Libya was in the midst of a bloody civil war. The conflict ended that October after the murder of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. Now, as many as tens of thousands of citizens are missing. Mass graves containing dozens or even hundreds of bodies have already been unearthed, and many missing people are yet to be found.

“Exhuming the mass graves and collecting the samples from the unknown bodies will depend on the reports [that] inform us [about] the place of these graves, because the previous regime tried to hide the crimes,” says forensic geneticist Esam Zreg, director of the Technical Department of Missing Persons in Libya’s Ministry for the Affairs of the Families of the Martyrs & Missing (MAFMM). “Sometimes [Gaddafi loyalists would] execute people and bury them in secret places.”

In an attempt to bring closure to the tens of thousands of grieving families in the country, Zreg and collaborators at MAFMM, founded in December 2011 by the National Transitional Council of Libya, are launching a massive sampling and sequencing effort. A DNA lab is currently under construction in Zreg’s building in Tripoli, that will house state-of-the-art sequencing equipment. Libyan scientists will travel to various countries for training in modern DNA forensics techniques, then return home to process hundreds of thousands of tissue samples from unidentified human remains and family members of the missing over the next decade.

Zreg and his colleagues consulted with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Commission on Missing Persons, along with other support organizations, and came up with a two-part plan of action. One part of the mission is to collect blood samples from three to five different relatives for each missing person in order to build a database for identifying the missing. The second half is to extract and sequence DNA from human remains that are found, then scan the newly built database for matches.

“It’s a huge project,” says Kerstin Montelius, a geneticist at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Sweden, who is not involved in the effort. “I do think it will take several years to be able to go through all the remains . . . but I think it’s doable.”

Zreg’s team received $2.5 million in funding from a Spain-based oil company called Repsol, and in January announced its partnership with global biotechnology tools company Life Technologies and the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC), which in 2011 received a $3.5 million grant from Applied Biosciences (now part of Life Technologies) to establish a center to help countries throughout the world launch their own DNA databases. As the Libyan lab nears completion, Zreg and three other researchers will travel to Texas to train with Arthur Eisenberg, a veritable pioneer in DNA forensics and director of the UNTHSC Center for Human Identification. Eisenberg and his colleagues have put together a 2-week program to provide the Libyan researchers with training in “all of the techniques and methodologies to clean the skeletal remains, cut the remains to extract DNA, and then to amplify the DNA to detect the different genetic profiles,” Eisenberg says.

The UNTHSC group will also advise Zreg and the others on some of the common challenges of DNA forensics work. For example, “the samples for the human remains are old,” says UNTHSC forensic geneticist Jianye Ge, who will help train the Libya scientists, “so it may not be easy to get good results” from them. To increase the likelihood of making a high-confidence identification, “I would recommend the Libyan guys sequence the mitochondrial DNA, especially for the bones,” he says. “For each cell we have, we only have one copy of nuclear DNA, but for the mitochondrial DNA, one cell has several hundreds of copies.”

For now, Zreg and his teams are busy sampling living and deceased Libyans to build up a bank of samples ready to be processed as soon as the lab is complete. Zreg’s teams began sampling family members of the missing in March 2012, and by December had more than 10,000 samples banked. They hope to have completed this part of the mission by the end of 2013.

The teams have also begun the collection of samples from the deceased, having exhumed more than 400 bodies to date. Though there is no way to know for sure how many bodies remain to be found, “we have an expectation that there will be around 20,000 bodies,” says Zreg, who lost a close friend during the national upheaval. “We expect a gap of time, like 10 years, for this file to be solved. . . . We have to be patient for this, and it will not be easy.”

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35246/title/IDing-War-Victims/

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16 people feared dead in Zambia's road accident


At least 16 people are feared dead in central Zambia's Chibombo district following a terrible accident involving a minibus driver and a truck, police told Xinhua on Tuesday.

The police said the minibus was coming from Kabwe town in central Zambia to Lusaka, the capital of the southern African country, when the driver lost control and collided with an oncoming truck before overturning.

The accident happened today around 06:30 hours along the Great North road when the driver of the bus lost control after a rear tyre burst and went on to hit into an on-coming truck and overturned.

The driver of the Volvo truck belonging to SABOC transport of Zimbabwe Reg. No. AAF 8926 and trailer No. 6767T Nathan Kambauwa aged 40 of Harare escaped unhurt.

The bodies of the deceased are lying in Liteta hospital mortuary while the injured are admitted in the University Teaching Hospital.

The bus was carrying 20 passengers, of whom 16 people died on the spot and the four others were seriously injured, according to witnesses.

The driver of the minibus only identified as Costa is among the dead.

The other deceased persons comprising of eight males and eight females have not yet been identified.

The injured have been evacuated to the University Teaching Hospital, the country's largest referral hospital in Lusaka. Zambia Police Deputy Spokesperson Charity Munganga said, "I can confirm that we have received reports of an accident involving a minibus and a truck but details will be availed to you later," she said.

Police Spokesperson comfirmed the tragedy in a statement and appealed to members of the public whose relatives were travelling from Kabwe to Lusaka this morning using the involved minibus to help with the identification of the bodies.

The accident occurred on the same spot where 54 people traveling in a big bus perished recently in a collision with a truck. Road crashes are common in Zambia and are mainly caused by careless driving and the poor state of roads.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/article_xinhua.asp?id=139648

http://www.lusakatimes.com/2013/04/30/another-chibombo-accident-claims-16-lives-on-the-spot/

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Mexico: 6 killed in government plane crash, including police


Six people who were traveling in a small plane belonging to the Mexican Attorney General’s Office died Tuesday when it crashed in the northern state of Zacatecas.

The crash in Zacatecas state occurred a day after the authorities onboard had carried out an arrest warrant against several suspected members of the Zetas cartel, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said in a statement.

After the suspects were jailed, the three agents took a flight bound for Mexico City late Monday but their plane returned to the airport due to "mechanical failures," Murillo Karam said. They waited until the next day to take their fateful flight.

“Regrettably the occupants died,” a spokesman for the AG’s office confirmed to Efe, adding that at present the identities of the victims and the cause of the accident are not known.

The plane went down shortly before noon in the municipality of Morelos after taking off from the town of Calera en route to Mexico City.

The Beechcraft King Air 300 hit the ground 10 minutes after taking off, and the cause of the crash is under investigation, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said in a statement.

Evidently, the plane lost altitude, ultimately hitting the ground and bursting into flame in the community known as Noria de los Gringos, Milenio Television reported.

The state attorney general of Zacatecas, Arturo Nahle, confirmed the six deaths via Twitter and said that the aircraft was the same one on which federal Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam traveled to the state last month.

Two federal police agents and an agent working for the organized crime investigation branch of the attorney general's office were among the casualties. The plane's pilot, co-pilot and a mechanic also were killed.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/30/world/americas/mexico-plane-crash/

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Armageddon survival packs aid Chinese family after quake


A man from Sichuan Province recently made Chinese headlines for using several “bug-out backpacks” following the April 20 earthquake in Ya’an.

Li Yonggang, a 39-year-old freelance worker from Tianquan County, was interviewed by Southern Metropolis Daily.

After the magnitude-7 quake hit, Li ran out of the house wearing only his underwear, according to the report. He went back inside to get dressed, and brought out a large pack weighing nearly 55 pounds. He had prepared another four bugout bags for everyone in his family, except his baby son–his wife, mother, and two daughters each had their own pack.

Li’s bag was the biggest; the smallest belonged to his 6-year-old daughter, and only weighed 11 pounds. The packs contained tents, sleeping bags, clothes, food, a compass, gloves, headlamps, and even surgical suture kit, the Daily reported.

Li took the big backpack to his father-in-law’s home, and set up three tents.

“I’m completely self-sufficient. I don’t burden anyone,” Li told Southern Metropolis Daily.

Li said that his family did not have to worry about lack of food, as the packs contained dry crackers, army-style cans, and tablets to purify water. He had also hidden 220 pounds of vacuum-packed rice in his house. Six days after the quake, he still had not asked local authorities for any food supplies.

Li’s parents were born in the 1940’s in China and experienced horrifying famine in the years 1959-1961. “Many people died of starvation during the three-years of famine. At least two relatives told me how that they had to eat human flesh from dead bodies to survive the famine,” he told the Daily.

After Li experienced the Wenchuan earthquake five years ago, he was haunted by his parent’s experiences and determined to try to protect his family. Li began learning about survival.

He purchased the necessary supplies, prepared the five backpacks, and rented three cabins in the countryside for his children to use as survival practice sites.

After the latest earthquake, Li told the Daily that he learned a few lessons. “I had too many cans. In case of a real emergency, we wouldn’t be able to walk far with that much baggage.”

He added that he hoped he would never have to use the backpacks again.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/32949-armageddon-survival-packs-aid-chinese-family-after-quake/

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Bangladeshis turn rescuers after building collapse


The heat in the rubble was sweltering. It closed in on his body like the darkness around him, making it hard to breathe. Working by the faint glow of a flashlight, he slithered through the broken concrete and spotted a beautiful young woman, her crushed arm pinned beneath a pillar. She was dying, and the only way to get her out was to amputate.

But Saiful Islam Nasar had no training, and almost no equipment. He's a mechanical engineer who just days earlier rushed hundreds of kilometers (miles) from his hometown in southern Bangladesh when he heard the Rana Plaza factory building had collapsed and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of garment workers were trapped.

He also understood that maimed women can be cast from their homes.

"I asked her, 'Sister, are you married?' She said 'Yes.' I asked her, 'If I cut off your arm, will your husband take you again?' She said, 'My husband loves me very much.' And then I started to cut," he said.

He had brought a syringe loaded with pain-killer — his father was a village medic, and had taught him how to give injections — and he cut through her arm with a small surgical blade. It was easier than he expected because the arm had already been so badly damaged.

He pointed at fading specks of blood staining his vest and pants. He began to cry.

"There was no alternative," he said.

Bangladesh is well-versed in tragedy, a country where floods, ferry sinkings, fires and cyclones strike with cruel regularity. But with state services riven by dysfunction and corruption, often the only hope is the person beside you.

It is a country that makes heroes out of everyday citizens.

Many of the first responders at Rana Plaza were men like Nasar — neighborhood residents, fellow garment workers, relatives of the missing and charity workers — and they repeatedly took some of the most dangerous work. Using little more than hammers, hacksaws and their bare hands, they crawled into tiny holes in the wreckage, breaking through concrete and steel bars and working around the clock to drag out the victims.

They knew they were risking their lives.

Hemaet Ali, a 50-year-old construction worker who came to volunteer, told the people around him that his identity card, with his home address, was in his shirt pocket.

"If I die inside, please make sure that my body reaches my family," he told them.

Nasar came to Savar with 50 other men from the small volunteer organization he runs, Sunte Ki Pao. Normally, they assist people who have been in traffic accidents, offering basic first aid, securing valuables and contacting relatives. During seasonal floods, they help however they can when the waters rush into town. Nothing had prepared them to work the front line of their country's largest industrial accident.

"It was beyond imagination," he said Monday, six days after the collapse, when the search for survivors had given way to the search for bodies, and heavy equipment had replaced the rescuers.

Thin and lanky, the 24-year-old was well-suited for crawling through the tight tunnels he cut. At first, he had only his mobile phone to light the tiny spaces. He could see shattered chairs and tables. Sewing machines and fabric. And the battered bodies of the men and women who were crushed when the walls and ceilings came crashing down.

"I could just fit my shoulders in," he said. "I often felt like I would die and I would call out to my God."

The rescues, each of which could take many hours, were exhausting, both physically and emotionally.

"We would shout, 'Is there anybody here? Please make a sound.' Sometimes you would hear an 'Oooh, oooh' and you knew someone was there," he said.

Over six days, he pulled six people out alive, and removed dozens of bodies. He would work until exhaustion set in and then attempt to sleep — the first night on the roof of the collapsed building, the next two in a nearby field. Even now that he has moved into a tent, rest does not come easy.

"The images of the bodies flash in my mind," he said.

Eating also has been a problem.

"I have lost my taste," he explained. "I just keep smelling the smell of dead bodies."

The sickly sweet waft of rot from the building was ever present, and rescuers routinely sprayed cheap floral air freshener around the site in a futile attempt to control it.

Not all of the rescue workers at Rana Plaza were untrained. The government sent some 1,000 soldiers and firefighters to the site. But from all appearances, the majority of the rescuers who went into the rubble were volunteers. Altogether, some 2,500 people were brought out alive from the wreckage. The death toll stands at 386, but will surely climb as the largest pieces of rubble are moved.

The military, which oversaw much of the rescue efforts, dismisses the notion that they let volunteers take the lead.

"I have not heard of rescuing so many people in recent history anywhere in the world in case of such disaster," said Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hasan Suhrawardy, a top military officer in the Savar area. "What we have done is excellent."

But it is clear that volunteers once again carried more than their share of the country's burden.

Sayed Shohel Harman, an unpaid community volunteer for the fire department, found a survivor whose arm was pinned under a concrete slab. The man begged Harman to give him a knife so he could cut off his own arm and free himself. Harman refused, saying he would go and get help.

"The doctors said it was too risky for them to go inside," Harman said. "They told me to go back and try to drag him out."

When he returned, the man was there, but his arm was gone. Another volunteer had given the man a knife and he had cut through his own flesh and crushed bones.

"I just sat down after seeing that," Harman said. "It was horrible."

Nasar said he will soon return to his hometown, where he will comfort his worried mother and look for a new job. He was forced to resign from his to join in the rescue. But most of all, he will think of the beautiful young woman whose name he never heard and whose fate he never learned.

"I pray to Allah that she has been saved, is alive and can return to her husband."

Wednesday 1 May 2013

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/bangladeshis-turn-rescuers-building-collapse-19073348#.UYAr9UBzA34

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