Saturday 5 October 2013

Lampedusa boat disaster: Aerial search mounted



The Italian coastguard is using planes and helicopters to spot migrants' bodies around the boat which sank off the island of Lampedusa on Thursday.

Bad weather is hampering divers. So far, 111 bodies have been found, 155 people have been pulled out alive, but more than 200 are said to be in the seas close to the Mediterranean island.

The boat was carrying some 500 people - mostly from Eritrea and Somalia.

The 20m (66ft) vessel began taking on water when its motor stopped working as it neared Lampedusa on Thursday morning, survivors said.

Some of those on board then reportedly set fire to a piece of material to try to attract the attention of passing ships, only to have the fire spread to the rest of the boat.

The boat - which set sail from the Libyan port of Misrata - is thought to have capsized when everyone moved to one side.

Video footage later showed the vessel sitting upright on the seabed some 45m (150ft) below the surface.

The skipper of the boat, a 35-year-old Tunisian, was arrested. It has emerged that he was deported from Italy in April.

Of the bodies recovered so far 58 were men, 49 were women and two were children of one and six years old. Italian officials say there could be more women in the sunken boat than men - among the 155 survivors only four were women.

Divers are hoping to resume the search in the coming hours, officials say.

"Though the bad sea conditions persist, our guys are ready to go down if a window opens up that makes it safe for them," coastguard spokesman Filippo Marini said.

The operation had initially focused on an area off Lampedusa called Rabbit Island, but the search was then widened beyond the initial radius of four nautical miles in an effort to recover bodies that had been swept away by tides.

The divers have been describing seeing horrific scenes inside the wreckage.



So many bodies have been brought ashore that the island has had to send for more coffins and turn a hangar at the airport into a huge makeshift mortuary.

Libya is attractive for migrants wanting to travel on to Europe, says the BBC's Rana Jawad

An evening mass and silent candlelit procession were held on Lampedusa. Most residents of the island turned out, the BBC's Gavin Hewitt reports from the scene.

People were sombre, but also angry that such tragedies were happening all too often and so little was being done to prevent them, he adds.

Lampedusa Mayor Giusi Nicolini - who wept at the scene - said: "After these deaths, we are expecting something to change. Things cannot stay the same.

"The future of Lampedusa is directly linked to policies on immigration and asylum."

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano has warned there is no reason to think this would be the last disaster of its kind.

Mr Alfano said the divers had seen dozens of bodies in the wreck. "There could be even more in the hold, where the poorest of the poor are usually put," he told parliament.



The UN said that in recent months, most migrants attempting the crossing were fleeing the conflicts in Syria and the Horn of Africa rather than coming from sub-Saharan Africa.

The number of those arriving by sea to Italy this year until 30 September stood at 30,100, according to the UN.

The main nationalities of those arriving were Syrian (7,500), Eritrean (7,500) and Somali (3,000).

Illegal migration numbers

- Since 1988, at least 19,142 people died trying to reach Europe's borders - 2,352 in 2011 alone

- 6,707 have died off Sicily in the past 10 years

- In 2012 Italy examined 27,000 asylum claims - 24% of applicants got international protection

- 272,208 asylum claims in whole EU in 2012, of which 25% were in Germany

- 30,100 irregular migrants reached Italy by sea in Jan-Oct 2013 - about half were from Syria and Eritrea

Sources: UNHCR, Frontex, Fortress Europe

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24407808

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Bus plunges down hillside outside Mexico City, killing 14


At least 14 people were killed and 20 others injured when a bus fell into a ravine in Mexico State, south-central Mexico on Friday, local authority said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The accident happened about 7:30 a.m.(1230 GMT) when a passenger bus fell into a 50-meter-deep ravine in Naucalpan-Toluca highway. The vehicle was heading to Cuatro Caminos, a metro station in Mexico City, Naucalpan Municipal Police said.

Fourteen victims, including two children, were killed on the spot. The injured people were sent to local hospitals by three helicopters and several ambulances, local police said.



The cause of the accident is still under investigation, while the preliminary finding shows the driver lost control when the bus was speeding on the road.

The road has been suspended to facilitate rescue work.

According to highway safety experts, every year in Mexico there are approximately 4 million traffic accidents that take about 24,000 lives.

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://en.apa.az/news/200608

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Seven days, eight disasters, 69 dead, 33 rescued: Indian National disaster response force


In the past one week, eight states have seen disasters ranging from floods to building collapses where personnel of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) have rescued 33 people and recovered 69 dead bodies.

During the period from September 28 to October 4, NDRF deployed 38 teams at various locations in the country viz Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Maharastra, Uttarakhand, Punjab and West Bengal for rescue and relief operations. The nature of disasters included floods, drowning cases and building collapse, said NDRF sources.

On September 27, when a five-storey building collapsed at Brahmadev Ghoth Marg, opposite Dockyard road in South Mumbai trapping scores of people, it was an NDRF team, in the city for Monsoon rescue operations, that came to the aide of victims.

According to NDRF, the incident took place at 6 am when most of the residents inside the building were asleep. State administration immediately flashed information to all rescue agencies including NDRF. Two teams of 5 battalion NDRF already deployed in the city for Monsoon rescue rushed to the spot with their equipment. NDRF with State Fire service conducted search and rescue operation for more than 48 hours and seeing the gravity of disaster pressed two more teams from Pune into service. NDRF along with other agencies manage to save 33 lives and also retrieved 60 dead bodies from the derbies of the collapsed building.

On October 1, a boat capsize incident took place in Bhojpur district of Bihar. In this incident 10 persons fell into river Ganga near Barahra, Bhojpur. District Administration called NDRF for help which rushed a team of personnel from Bihta, Patna. The force carried out operation for more than 40 hours and retrieve nine dead bodies.

Similarly on October 3, nine persons were feared drowned as a boat carrying 17 persons capsized in Beas river in Kapurthala district, Punjab. An NDRF rescue team comprising of 20 rescuers rushed to the spot from 7th bn NDRF Bhatinda (Punjab) and started rescue operation. The rescue operation is still going on, said NDRF officers.

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Seven-days-eight-disasters-69-dead-33-rescued-National-disaster-response-force/articleshow/23535762.cms

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Rough seas complicate search for boat capsize survivors



Choppy waters are complicating the search for dozens of African migrants who are missing and believed dead after their boat sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Authorities have recovered 111 bodies and expect to find many others in the wreckage of the ship, now sitting in about 40 meters of water.

Rescue teams saved 155 people after the boat, carrying an estimated 500 people, sank Thursday. The U.N. refugee agency says all but one of the survivors is Eritrean, with the other being Tunisian.

Pope Francis, on a visit to the Italian town of Assisi, proclaimed Friday "a day of tears." Flags are flying at half staff, and schools are observing a minute of silence for the victims.

The Italian state news agency ANSA said the boat, carrying Eritrean and Somali asylum seekers, went down in flames Thursday after migrants tried to send a distress signal by lighting a blanket on fire. Witnesses said the fire inadvertently ignited leaking fuel.

The disaster, described as one of Italy's worst migrant maritime tragedies, came days after 13 would-be migrants drowned off the coast of nearby Sicily after their boat sank and they tried to swim to shore.

Lampedusa, an island closer to continental Africa than to the Italian mainland, is often the destination for boats full of migrants seeking entrance to the European Union.The United Nations refugee agency says the boat originated in Libya.

Speaking Friday, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres called for a crackdown on human smugglers and greater protection for refugees.

The blog Fortress Europe, which tallies migrant deaths, says more than 6,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Africa, have died in the Sicilian Channel since 1994.

Italy is observing an official day or mourning for the dead migrants.

Recent Maritime Accidents Involving Migrants:

-October 3, 2013: Estimates of 300 people dead or missing after boat catches fires and capsizes near Italian island of Lampedusa.

-September 27, 2013: At least 21 asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East, killed after boat bound for Australia sinks off Indonesia's coast.

-December 18, 2012: Boat carrying migrants capsized off Somali coast. U.N. Refugee agency says as many as 55 people killed.

-December 16, 2012: Migrant boat traveling from Turkey to Greece capsized. At least 20 people killed.

-September 6, 2012: Boat carrying illegal immigrants sinks near western Turkey. At least 58 people drown.

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://www.voanews.com/content/italy-mourns-migrant-capsize-victims/1762804.html

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Cianjur migrant boat: Search for missing boat people ends


The National Police and relevant authorities have called off their search-and-rescue operation, which was launched last week following the sinking of a boat packed with migrants in waters off Cianjur, West Java.

National Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Agus Rianto said on Friday that they had rescued 28 people, and recovered the bodies of 42 others during the operation.

“Our disaster victims investigation [DVI] team has completed post-mortems on 36 of those who died. The remaining six will be examined today [Friday],” he said at National Police headquarters in South Jakarta.

The police have transferred 24 of those rescued to West Java’s Sukabumi Immigration Office, while the remaining victims are being treated in a local hospital. The boat, which was carrying migrants from Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen capsized and sank en route to Australia’s Christmas Island.

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/10/05/search-missing-boat-people-ends.html

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Ontario lab joins search to identify Lac-Megantic's still-missing


All that was left of Marie-France Boulet’s home was delivered to her family in a small Ziploc bag.

The 62-year-old woman’s world — the lingerie boutique she owned on Lac-Mรฉgantic’s main street, her apartment behind it, the extensive clothing, jewelry, and porcelain collections inside — was reduced to a handful of charred, deformed items: melted pieces of gold that were once earrings, and a spoon that Boulet brought back from a trip to Switzerland.

It is not hard to understand why, in the nearly three months since the July 6 train disaster, a team of expert investigators and forensic specialists have failed to identify Boulet as a victim.

Located at the epicentre of the explosions, her home burned for hours and at extreme temperatures. It’s believed she was inside when the unmanned train barrelled into town, derailing and setting off a string of explosions.

Jennifer Aguirre, a DNA technologist at Gamma-Dynacare Medical Laboratories in Thunder Bay, prepares DNA samples for loading onto an automated genetic analyzer. The lab is helping identify remains from the Lac-Megantic disaster. zoom

“It’s as if she disappeared from the planet,” said Boulet’s sister, Martine Boulet-Pelletier. “That’s probably the hardest part to accept, the fact that we have nothing.”

This week, the Quebec coroner’s office was set to return to bereaved families the last of the remains of the 39 identified victims, ending what had been for many a painful liminal period between death and finality.

But closure eludes the families of those still considered missing.

Of the 47 police say were killed, eight people remain unidentified by the Quebec coroner’s office. Though there is little doubt about the fate of their loved ones, the absence of certainty has left these families emotionally exhausted and in legal limbo.

It is why, nearly 2,000 kilometres from the site of the disaster, forensic experts in a Thunder Bay laboratory are employing a specialized DNA technique — unique in Canada — to continue the painstaking task of identification.

“We are doing whatever we can,” said Yvan Cรดtรฉ, a cell biologist and the general manager of Orchid PRO-DNA, the forensic arm of private medical laboratory Gamma-Dynacare. “We are really going to the edge of science to be able to get those (DNA) profiles.”

In the aftermath of the fiery derailment, it was evident victim identification would be extraordinarily difficult in some cases. Some bodies were so severely burned, DNA analysis was the only hope.

Family members of the missing brought investigators their relative’s toothbrush, hairbrush and razors — anything that could provide genetic information experts could cross-reference. In Boulet’s case, all nine of her siblings had blood taken to help build a genetic family tree.

But that information is only useful if investigators can obtain DNA from the remains. In need of help to extract genetic information from severely burned remains, the Quebec coroner’s office reached out to the International Commission on Missing Peoples, a Sarajevo-based organization that specializes in the identification of large numbers of missing people.

A few weeks after the disaster, the lab received five “extremely challenging” bone samples, said Dr. Thomas Parsons, chief of forensic science for the ICMP.

“Some of the material that they had, based on its extremely burned state, would really raise the eyebrows of any DNA scientist with regard to whether they would be able to get anything out of it,” Parsons said.

Extracting DNA from bones is difficult at the best of times, because the actual amount of DNA is significantly less than in tissue or blood samples. A bone’s composition also makes it challenging to access the DNA.

In the Lac-Mรฉgantic case, success depended on how completely the bone had been exposed to heat. Forensic specialists were looking for “little micro niches where the DNA has survived in highly fragmented form,” Parsons said.

“To get the DNA out of there then requires that your methods are really efficient at unlocking, and releasing into solution, every bit of DNA,” he said.

From the bone samples his organization received, DNA profiles of two unique individuals were found, Parsons said.

Ending doubt surrounding a death is what Parsons and the ICMP continually strive to do — the lab runs tests on between 50 and 60 samples a day, Parsons said.

“In addition to the tragedy and the loss, to superimpose uncertainty into that is really a multiplier of the trauma. To be able to alleviate that uncertainty is a huge benefit to individuals and to individual families,” Parsons said.

That work continues in the Thunder Bay lab, the only one in Canada offering what is called mitochondrial DNA analysis for forensic purposes.

Genetic identification is typically done by gathering DNA from the human genome. But there are only two copies of genomic DNA per cell, and exposure to heat often causes damage to that type of DNA.

By contrast, there are at least 100 copies of the DNA contained in mitochondria, a component of human cells.

In cases where genomic DNA may be too damaged to be useful, mitochondrial DNA could still provide vital information, said Cรดtรฉ, the cell biologist at Gamma-Dynacare.

“The odds are that at the end, if the DNA has been damaged, you will at least have a single copy that is still viable of mitochondrial DNA, where you will be able to get your result,” Cรดtรฉ said.

The company’s technique has previously been called upon by police working on a case, depending on forensic evidence. For instance, a strand of hair only contains genomic DNA if the root of the hair is intact. But if hair lacking a root is found on a crime scene, mitochondrial DNA can still give identifying clues.

Cรดtรฉ said the lab has received some DNA samples from family members of the still-missing, and the lab will cross-reference their mitochondrial DNA with any found in the samples they have received.

It takes between two and four weeks to obtain results. The lab is working closely with Quebec’s coroner’s office — reporting results, getting more samples, going back for more results — so it’s difficult to say when their role in the Lac-Mรฉgantic identification will be complete.

“It takes time,” Cรดtรฉ said.

Tiny fragments of bone were located in Boulet’s home, a building she shared with neighbour Richard Veilleux, who is also among the eight missing.

Boulet lived in an apartment behind the lingerie boutique, and Veilleux lived above it. It is believed they were the sole occupants of the building that night.

DNA testing was conducted on the fragments, but they were so badly damaged that tests could not even reveal whether they belonged to a man or a woman.

Investigators told the family that, based on where the fragments were found, they were more likely to have been from Veilleux. The family knows Boulet was at home before midnight — she wrote an email to a friend at 11:24 p.m. — and believes that she was in her room at the time of the accident at 1:14 a.m. If that’s correct, investigators say she would not have had time to move across the home to where the remains were found.

“We asked the coroner, ‘Did you find bodies in the street?’ We thought that maybe she heard, and that she left and went running,” Boulet-Pelletier said. “But they told us they didn’t find any.”

The Boulet family does not know if the bone fragments found in Boulet’s building were among those sent to Thunder Bay; testing is also being conducted in New York, and more could be done at the Sarajevo-based organization, according to a spokesperson for the Quebec coroner’s office.

The coroner’s office would not comment on specific DNA testing cases. An update on the identification process is scheduled to occur in the coming weeks, Boulet-Pelletier said.

In late August, as they began to realize Boulet may never be identified, the family discussed the possibility of a funeral. Some wanted to go ahead with the ceremony, others wanted to wait.

So relatives gathered and took a vote, deciding a funeral should be held. The family chose Sept. 21, because it would have been their mother’s 89th birthday. Boulet’s name was added to a grave in the family’s cemetery plot in Lac-Mรฉgantic.

The funeral was “a big liberation,” Boulet-Pelletier said, but it had a different feel because there was no death certificate, meaning the family could not sign a register of her death.

It has also meant paperwork to close her business cannot be completed, and that relatives cannot collect insurance from her death.

The family does not even know Boulet’s last wishes for her estate. Her will was kept at a legal office located in the same block as her home, and it too, completely burned down.

Some uncertainty will end in the coming weeks, when an official from the Quebec coroner’s office will go before a judge, attempting to obtain a death certificate by presenting the facts that suggest Boulet is dead, Boulet-Pelletier said.

“When we get that paper, we can sign the death registry, then we can finalize,” Boulet-Pelletier said.

There is talk of building a monument to the victims of the Lac-Mรฉgantic disaster who were never identified, Boulet-Pelletier said.

She hopes that any remains not identified in the coming months or years could be buried there, so that if DNA technology continues to improve, they could perhaps be removed and tested.

Boulet’s family will try to move on in the meantime. But “if ever she will be identified,” said Boulet-Pelletier, “it will be like a gift.”

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/10/04/ontario_lab_joins_search_to_identify_lacmegantics_stillmissing.html

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Dozens of bodies discovered in Bosnian mass grave


Dozens of bodies discovered buried in a mass grave in northern Bosnia are believed to be those of Bosniak Muslims and Croats killed by Serb forces in the early days of the civil war.

Forensics experts have already uncovered 94 bodies at the site in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260km north west of Sarajevo, and say they expect to disover many more.

Initial excavations unearthed a seven metre thick layer composed of human remains hidden under artificial embankments.

The victims are believed to be Muslims and Croats from the Prijedor area killed in the summer of 1992, when Bosnian Serb forces had taken control of the region.

Three Europeans burned to death by mob of vigilantes in Madagascar after they were accused of murdering a young boy

They were killed in a brutal campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.



Paramilitary units and the Bosnian Serb army expelled the non-Serb population, destroyed their homes and separated families while forcing thousands into detention camps where many were tortured and later executed.

Pictures of emaciated inmates at one of the detention camps, Omarska, resembling images from the Holocaust, shocked the world in the summer of 1992.

More than 3,300 people were reported missing from the Prijedor area. So far the remains of more than 2,000 victims have been found and identified, mostly by DNA analysis.

Bosnia’s prosecution office said they expect this to be one of the largest mass graves ever found in this part of the country.

Saturday 5 October 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2444015/Dozens-bodies-discovered-Bosnian-mass-grave-believed-victims-genocide-carried-Serb-forces.html

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