Wednesday 3 July 2013

Uganda fuel tanker fire: Families clash over bodies


There was commotion at Mulago Hospital mortuary when four families claimed two bodies, arguing that they were of their relatives who perished in Saturday's inferno.

The bodies are among the eight that were burnt beyond recognition.

The hospital administration and Police withheld the contested bodies until DNA tests are carried out to establish their identities.

Kampala metropolitan spokesperson Ibin Ssenkumbi said some members of the bereaved families claimed they would be able to recognise the bodies of their relatives who were severely burnt. But four different families ended up claiming two bodies.

He said the relatives of the unidentified victims were told to go back to the hospital on Monday, when the DNA results will be released.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://allafrica.com/stories/201307031318.html

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40 bodies allegedly stolen from cemetery in Puerto Rico


The remains of at least 40 people are missing from a cemetery in the sleepy mountain town of Gurabo, where officials are trying to solve a mystery that has frightened neighbors and left families distraught.

The apparent thefts occurred at the town's oldest cemetery, which was built in 1912 and features rows of white mausoleums located on the outskirts of Gurabo.

"I have spent nine years with the municipality," Public Works Director Jose Roman told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "I have never, never, ever had something like this happen to me."

No one has been able to explain the disappearances, although many residents believe the bones are being stolen for Santeria rituals, practiced by those who follow the Caribbean-based religion that blends Roman Catholicism and the African Yoruba faith.

Roman acknowledged that possibility, as well as a hypothesis that thieves are snatching boxes made of steel that hold the bones to sell them on the black market. However, he said no bones have been left behind.

Government officials made the discovery last month when they tried to exhume several remains to move them to another cemetery, only to find they were gone.

Since then, Roman has asked the owners of the cemetery's more than 300 mausoleums to verify if their loved ones are still buried there.

Amparo Diaz Santana, a 70-year-old homemaker, said the bodies of two of her nephews are missing.

"When we opened the tomb, they weren't there," she said. "We kept looking, and noticed there were a bunch of other open tombs."

Her family filed a report with police, but no one has been arrested and it seems authorities have no leads.

Roman said there are three full-time employees at the cemetery during the day, but that no one oversees it at night. Finding security guards has been a problem, he said.

Roman said police agreed to drive by the cemetery at night as a preventive measure. Police investigating the case could not be immediately reached for comment.

Arlene Gonzalez, a santera, or Santeria priest, with the Templo Yoruba of Puerto Rico, denied people associated with the faith were to blame. She said the faith employs animals, but not human bodies, in its rituals.

She said the disappearance of the remains could be related to Paleria, another syncretic faith that uses human bones in its rites.

Relatives have been devastated by the loss of their loved ones' remains.

Rosa Feliciano, a 78-year-old homemaker, said she learned in late June that the remains of her son were missing. He died 17 years ago.

"This has caused me the greatest pain ever, even greater than the day I lost him," she said.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/03/bodies-stolen-from-cemetery_n_3540152.html?utm_hp_ref=latino-voices

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Guatemala case casts spotlight on indigenous group


Life for the indigenous Ixil Mayans in the mountains west of Guatemala City is worn and static like an old photograph.

Seventeen years after the end of a civil war that saw hundreds of their villages razed and thousands of their loved ones killed, the Ixil people still live in mud-and-wood houses in the most rugged and isolated parts of northwestern Guatemala. Most of them have no drinking water, paved roads or basic services such as health and education.

Largely ignored by authorities for centuries, the Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against the Ixil during his 17 months in power in the 1980s.

The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.

Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade, said Ixil Mayans live in the same poverty as always.

"People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can't grow food, to the mountains made of stone," Garcia said. "The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can't, they migrate."

Feliciana Cobo was 8 when soldiers attacked her village. She and her family separated and ran into the mountains, where they hid for several days with nothing to eat.

Cobo said her mother was killed when the army bombed the village and surrounding area, and her grandmother died later after growing sick from the cold and bad living conditions. Her family eventually lost their land and their poverty deepened.

Now a single mother of three children, the 40-year-old Cobo borrows electricity from a neighbor and supports her kids by washing the clothes of neighbors and weaving garments to sell.

"I grew up during the civil war and I don't know how to read or write. I didn't go to school," Cobo said. "All I know is to weave."

Forensic experts are now exhuming bodies from the cemeteries that the Ixil people created to bury loved ones who died of starvation, hypothermia and disease - as well as munitions - while they hid from the soldiers in the mountains.

"I helped exhume my mother," Cobo said. "I don't know if it was the smoke or the impact of the bombs planes were dropping on us but we all left running and when we got back together, my mother had already died."

Garcia, who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them.

Cobo said she doubts justice will be done, but is glad some fellow Ixil Mayans could travel to Guatemala City to tell their stories at the trial.

"We're not inventing the dead," she said.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/03/3007192/guatemala-case-casts-spotlight.html

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Appeal over 1,000 unidentified bodies on UK missing persons website


There are currently 1,000 unidentified bodies on police files in the UK, some dating back 50 years. Last year, a website featuring facial reconstructions and, in rare cases photos of the dead person's face, was launched in the hope of solving them. So far, none have been solved.

A young man found hanged in secluded woods and a mystery body washed up on a beach are just two unsolved cases which have baffled Teesside detectives for years.

What little is known about them is detailed on the UK Missing Persons Bureau website along with seven other mystery bodies found in the North East and Cumbria.

Det Insp Paul Tait, head of Cleveland Police's force intelligence bureau, is aware the website is a long shot.

"It's clutching at straws a bit, but someone might be looking on the website and some little detail might jog a memory.

"But I don't like having unsolved cases because there is always that possibility that foul play has been involved, and I want to rule that out," he added.

Sometimes all scientist have to work with is a body part or bones.

In 1999, a trawler found a skull, 15 miles off the coast of Blyth, Northumberland.

Scientists determined it was a man, narrowed the age to between 30 and 40 years, and that he had been dead for more than six months, but less than 10 years.

Yet, despite being on the missing person's website for seven months, there have been no new leads.

DNA samples are taken and stored and, if someone believes they may be related to a missing person, their DNA could be tested and compared.

"Within reason if it was a credible line of enquiry - all unidentified bodies found will have a forensic examination conducted," Mr Tait explained.

Foul play

Cleveland Police is informed of 3,000 deaths every year - only a fraction are foul play.

The oldest one is the body washed up in 1970 at Redcar.

It was so decomposed that the sex could not even be determined and the age recorded as anything between 21 and 100.

The only real clue was a black boot, very well preserved but unfortunately not very distinctive.

He said: "The problem with remains from the water is that they can have been there a long time, and have travelled some distance.

"The chances are that a person washed up here could be from abroad," he explains. boot The boot was well preserved, but unfortunately not very distinctive

Another case is that of a young man found hanged near the A178 Graythorpe to Seal Sands Road in Hartlepool in 1981.

Even thought he had only been there a day, was fully clothed and had 'Sayer' written on the inside of his trainers, the case is still open 30 years on.

Police estimate he was aged between 20 and 30 but, although no foul play is suspected, it cannot be ruled out while the case is unsolved.

Badly decomposed

Another inquiry to remain open is that of a body washed up on the banks of the River Wear in 1992.

It was the badly decomposed lower half of a man aged 55 to 65, but with some small, unique features such as a gold, horseshoe earring.

He was also carrying a box of Altoids seriously strong peppermints made in York.

Once the police have finished, it is up to the local authority to bury and cremate any remains.

Certain cases will not feature on the site including babies and partial remains such as single bones, as publicity would be pointless.

A spokesman for the Missing Person's Bureau said: "The aim of site is to bring closure to the families and friends of the people featured.

"With new unidentified person cases we rely on modern forensic techniques but on older cases we believe that publicity is the best chance of getting images recognised."

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-22970716

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Earthquake claims 22 lives at Aceh province in Indonesia


Rescuers battled through landslides and blocked roads on Wednesday to reach survivors from an earthquake in Indonesia's Aceh province that has killed at least 22 people, including several children who died when a mosque collapsed.

More than 200 people were also injured in Aceh's remote, mountainous interior when the strong 6.1-magnitude quake struck on Tuesday, flattening buildings and triggering landslides.

The quake, which struck at a shallow depth of just 10km, has sparked panic in the natural disaster-prone region where more than 170 000 people were killed by the quake-triggered tsunami of 2004.

In Blang Mancung village, Central Aceh district, at least six children were killed when a mosque collapsed during a Koran reading session.

‘Biggest earthquake’

Subhan Sahara, head of the district's disaster agency, previously said a further 14 children were trapped in the collapse. But on Wednesday he said rescuers had not yet found any more bodies in the rubble and were now unsure how many had been inside.

"This is the biggest earthquake we've ever had here," he told AFP.

"People are still frightened, especially after the aftershocks last night. Nobody dared to stay at home. Everyone slept on the roads or in car parks.

"The earthquake triggered many landslides. People could not get out of the area because of fallen trees and mounds of earth blocking roads."

The main hospital in the district was overwhelmed and tents had been set up in the building's car park to treat the flood of patients, he said.

He added supplies of food and water were in short supply but rescuers had succeeded in reaching the remote area.

Buildings, homes damaged

Military, police and local government officials were trying to head to other affected areas on Wednesday by ground and in aircraft but some roads were blocked by landslips, the national disaster agency said.

The agency dispatched a helicopter from neighbouring Riau province to assist in rescue efforts, while an air force plane was also deployed to assess the damage.

"So far 22 people died, 210 people were injured, and thousands of buildings and homes were damaged in the quake," disaster agency spokesperson Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said.

The casualties were spread over the two worst-hit districts of Central Aceh and Bener Meriah, he said. Scores of people were being treated at hospitals across the region.

In Bener Meriah, about 300 people camped out overnight in open spaces, such as football fields, as the area was hit by strong aftershocks, Fauzi, an official from the local disaster agency told AFP.

He said many were in desperate need of food.

"There were strong aftershocks last night and people didn't want to go back home, so they stayed in the open overnight, but we don't have enough tents," said the official, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

"We have a power outage now and communications are unreliable," he added.

Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’

People ran outside in the provincial capital Banda Aceh as the quake - some 320km away - shook houses, and in Medan city to the south of the province on Sumatra Island.

Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, is regularly hit by quakes. The huge quake-triggered tsunami of 2004 not only killed tens of thousands in the province, but also many in countries around the Indian Ocean.

In April last year an 8.6-magnitude quake struck 431km off Banda Aceh, prompting an Indian Ocean-wide tsunami alert.

Five people died and seven were injured in Aceh in the quake and following aftershocks.

In September 2009 a major earthquake near Padang city on Sumatra killed more than 1 000 people.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" where tectonic plates collide, causing frequent seismic and volcanic activity.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.news24.com/World/News/Pressure-as-Indonesia-quake-toll-hits-22-20130703

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Missing ITBP jawans feared to have been burnt to ashes


The two missing ITBP jawans from the MI-17 chopper that crashed on June 25 in Kedarnath valley are feared to have been burnt to ashes. An ITBP team of expert mountaineers including those who have scaled Mount Everest has been looking for them since the crash without much success.

It is now being suspected that the missing jawans must have been close to the fuel tank and the resulting explosion from the crash must have melted their bodies.

"There is no question of them being alive. And even if they had been blasted to smithereens, we would have found some body parts at least. But nothing, not a trace has been found. So we suspect they took the brunt of the fuel tank explosion and were burnt to ashes," said a senior ITBP official adding that the search teams would now soon be called back.

An MI-17 helicopter carries over 1,000 litres of aviation turbine fuel which on explosion can melt anything in its vicinity.

Earlier the search teams had found some body parts that were suspected to be of the missing jawans. However, it was later identified to be that of an IAF personnel who died in the crash. "The IAF identified the body from the boots," said an ITBP official.

A total of 20 security personnel, including five IAF men, nine NDRF personnel and six ITBP jawans, perished in the crash. Bodies of 18 other victims have already been recovered and identified. The 20 men were going back to their camps after being relieved of their duty as they had been in the valley since the beginning of the deluge.

Meanwhile, ITBP claimed to have completed its rescue operations in Uttarakhand and was now in the process of pulling out its troops. On Tuesday, it rescued 63 people and is now reaching out to locals to help them in any manner possible.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Missing-ITBP-jawans-feared-to-have-been-burnt-to-ashes/articleshow/20887136.cms

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India floods: The search for missing victims


As India begins to wind down the rescue operations in flood-hit Uttarakhand state, the focus now shifts to families searching for the missing, reports the BBC Hindi's Vineet Khare from Rishikesh.

We are standing outside a crowded bus station in the holy city of Rishikesh in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, which has been ravaged by floods and landslides in the last fortnight.

Deepak Sindhwani, who had gone for a pilgrimage to the temple town of Kedarnath, is among some 3,000 people who, officials say, are still missing after the disaster.

More than 800 people are reported to have been killed so far, but the exact number of deaths, say officials, may never be known.

Mr Sindhwani spoke to his sister last on 16 June and said he was trapped in Kedarnath after a bridge collapsed. After that, his phone went dead.

Since then, Ms Sindhwani has been unsuccessfully running from pillar to post to get information about her brother's whereabouts.

'No answers'

Nilesh Ninav, 39, has been camping in Rishikesh for the past fortnight to look for his parents, Dattatreya Ganapat and Lata.

They spoke for the last time on 15 June when his parents rang up to say that they were caught in a traffic jam.

"I have been running around trying to speak to officials, but I am not getting any answers," he said.

Officials admit they have no easy answers to help the distraught relatives of the missing, whose faces are plastered on the walls of railway and bus stations and on billboards and vehicles in Rishikesh.

Swollen rivers have swept away entire villages, where there were many travellers in what is the peak tourist and pilgrimage season.

Several bodies, which were found in a highly decomposed state, have been cremated in the affected areas. Many bodies may have been washed away or remain buried under debris.

"The families want to know the real picture. But considering the scale of the disaster and with so little information available, we cannot give them a definite answer," says Piyoosh Rautela, a senior disaster management official.

A helpline set up for the relatives of the missing has received more than 25,000 calls so far. Officials say the number of calls has reduced, possibly as many people have given up on finding their relatives.

But people like Mitesh Goradia from Gujarat are not giving up yet.

Mr Goradia and his brothers flew to the state capital, Dehradun, looking for their mother Pushaben, cousin Jayprakash and his wife Varsha, who had gone on a pilgrimage and not returned.

They have sought help from the police, the army, politicians and officials. They have recorded video interviews on their mobile phones with returning pilgrims who they think may have met their mother and cousin.

"We have proof they were alive till 23 June. We do not know what happened after that - whether they were killed during the rescue or are still in the villages looking for help," he said.

"We will wait until the last person is rescued. After the rescue mission is called off we will go up the hills ourselves and try to find whether my mother is with the locals."

'Earnings gone'

Deoli-Brahmagram is a village hamlet, 7 kilometers away from Guptkashi.

A small village with a few households, living on the earnings from pilgrims on the 'chaar-dhaam' yatra.

The men of the village, most of them mule operators ferrying pilgrims from one place to another, visited Kedarnath everyday for work.

But things would change from now on. With the pilgrimage facilities halted for a year, this means of earning is gone.

While this is just one side of the coin, village men are worried more about what lies on the flip side.

Most of the men in the village are dead. The gram-panchayat here have reported 57 men missing, presumably dead, branding it as the village of the 'widows'.

As heart-wrenching stories pour in from all quarters of the state, what stuns one is the extent to which the villages in Uttarakhand are bearing the after-math of the calamity.

With most of them inaccessible due to broken roads, even meeting the everyday requirements is a challenge for these people.

20 year old Sangeeta does not know what to do now. She is pregnant with her third child and there is no trace of her husband since the flash floods.

Almost similar to her story is that of Vanitha, who was married just a year ago and is now grieving her husband's death. She has stopped eating and there is no one to console her because the situation is the same in every second household here.

Children too are missing in some cases. Around 13 children between the age of 14 and 18 years have been reported missing here. Students of Rudraprayag Govt School, these children used to Learn the business of mule operators in the Kedar Valley during the peak season.

Afterall, that was to be their bread and butter when they grew. Located on a steep slope, how the village survived the landslide is a mystery. Grief, trauma and loneliness, post- Uttarakhand floods, is a story that is not resctricted to the villages.

Families of the missing and the dead in the cities and the urban areas too are coping with reality.

While some have committed suicide, not being able to face the reality, life for the rest is a routine. Words and phrase like "cannot forget", "dead bodies", "death", "help", "nightmares" are not uncommon for the survivors or the families of the dead.

In fact, some have decided not to re-visit Kedarnath again because that would bring back nightmares.

Lessons learnt or not, this chapter in the history of India has left an indelible mark in the minds of the people, especially those who are trying to live with the memories of the loved ones they have lost forever.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-23123799

http://news.oneindia.in/feature/2013/surviving-uttarakhand-disaster-report-on-living-dead-1250996.html

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Preparing the dead in Afghanistan

The man who spends his days surrounded by dead Afghan soldiers waits in a faded shipping container across from the morgue. But Noori rarely waits long before he is called to work.

Inside the container is a bed, a fan and a hose for washing the bodies. He has prepared at least a thousand of them for burial over the past decade: victims of roadside bombs, gunshots, mortar rounds and disease, delivered to him in all the shapes death takes.

Noori, 33, removes the soldiers from identical wooden coffins that are draped in Afghanistan’s flag, and he performs his duty, preparing each for burial in the Islamic tradition. He washes off blood and dirt, sprinkles perfume and covers each in a white sheet, or kafan. That’s how their families will see them when they make it home.

What Noori sees first is much more bracing — a relentless procession of bodies just off the battlefield. He takes anti-anxiety medication to help him sleep. He doesn’t tell his family anything about his job at one of the Afghan military’s busiest medical centers, Kandahar Regional Military Hospital.

In Washington, questions about the future of Afghanistan are often phrased in terms of the Taliban’s strength and the Afghan army’s fighting ability. Noori’s perch on the war doesn’t provide clear answers to those impossibly large questions. But it has made him a front-line witness to the massive human cost associated with what’s formally articulated as a “military transition."

As his country’s army inherits the war from the United States and NATO, there are far more of those bodies than ever before. More than 250 Afghan soldiers and police are now killed in Afghanistan every month, many of them in the violent south where Noori works.

On that subject, Noori takes a long view. “The army will keep fighting, and men will keep dying, until there is peace," he said.

Noori was once employed by the group responsible for the death and destruction he sees on a daily basis. For several years, beginning when he was 19, he worked for the Taliban.

In Kandahar, the province where the Taliban was born, the only job he could find was sweeping the floors of the former regime’s main hospital. It was nearly two years before Sept. 11, 2001.

When war came to Afghanistan and the regime was toppled, Noori swept the same floors for the new Afghan government. Because he was a low-level worker, his previous allegiance was forgiven. Soon, he was watching government fatalities trickle in.

The man then in charge of washing bodies needed assistance. It wasn’t an alluring job, but it was an important one, Noori thought.

“It’s religious work," he recalls thinking to himself.

He volunteered. Since then, Noori, typically clad in medical scrubs and an Afghan army windbreaker, has handled corpses nearly every day for the past decade.

“I’ve seen more death than anyone," he said. “The bodies keep coming."

He gets middle-of-the-night phone calls beckoning him to the hospital so that bodies can be washed and buried as soon as possible, according to Muslim custom. He knows exactly what a bomb or a machine gun or a rocket-propelled grenade can do to a human body. Some soldiers look serene, almost untouched, and others don’t look human at all.

He knows to expect anything when he removes the lid of the coffin. Once he saw his neighbor and close friend, Hashmat. Noori mourned quietly while doing his job.

“Anyone would get angry to see a friend like that," he said.

As more Afghan soldiers die, Noori finds himself close to some of the worst violence. His morgue is the destination for those killed in contested swaths of the south and southwest, including several of Afghanistan’s bloodiest districts.

His colleagues ask how he’s holding up, and he often shrugs them off.

“No matter what the body looks like, he does his job," said Sgt. Mohammad Hussein, the head of the morgue. “It’s difficult."

The truth is that Noori can’t sleep without medication. He dispassionately describes himself as “physically and mentally exhausted." He keeps the bed in the storage container, he says, because after washing three or four bodies, he needs to lie down.

This year, just after the Taliban announced the beginning of its “spring offensive," bodies came in one after the next. One afternoon, an ambulance arrived from Helmand Province carrying three dead, all killed by separate makeshift bombs.

Noori was suddenly frenzied. He called to a group of soldiers for help lifting the bodies for washing. But the men walked away brusquely.

“They don’t have the courage to help," he said to himself as he worked alone.

There is a tenderness to the way Noori does his job, washing the men’s hair as if he were caring for a small child. But the circumstances can be brutal. Sometimes, he has to wash severed limbs separately. Sometimes, the clean white sheets turn red as soon as they’re placed on bodies. Sometimes, he sees fresh scars where doctors tried to operate, but failed or ran out of time.

On warm days, all the death and heat make the job nearly unbearable.

Spring and summer are when the fighting is most intense, particularly this year, when U.S. troops are doing minimal combat and Afghan soldiers are dying at a higher rate than Western forces ever did.

“In the summer, it’s too much," Noori said.

Questions about the Taliban’s strength do occupy Noori’s mind. Because he is an employee of the Afghan military but not a soldier, he lives off base, on the outskirts of Kandahar City. Every day, he drives one hour to Camp Hero, the sprawling military installation where the hospital is located.

He knows his unguarded living conditions make him vulnerable to insurgents, especially former Talibs, who target those working for the Afghan government. His colleagues, who live at Camp Hero, worry about him.

“If they find him, they will kill him immediately," Hussein said.

But Noori has taken an approach to his own life that seems to blend defiance and fatalism. He says he isn’t scared of the Taliban, but that he’s ready for death when death comes.

When the hospital calls him in during early morning or late nights, he slips out of bed quietly so that his wife does not wake. He has never described his job to her in any detail, because he worries she would begin to associate his early morning departures with the death of soldiers.

“She wouldn’t be able to take it psychologically," said Noori, who has an infant daughter.

Noori says he can take it, though he thinks often of the families who will be on the receiving end of his work, in whatever Afghan province the soldier called home.

“They deserve to see the bodies clean and neat," he said. “They are the ones who have suffered."

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20130702/NEWS0107/307020369/

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