Thursday 21 November 2013

Nazi U-boat sunk during Second World War is discovered by divers off of Indonesia - complete with skeletons of its doomed crew


Divers off the coast of Indonesia have discovered the wreck of a WW2 Nazi U-Boat - complete with the skeletons of its lost crew aboard.

Initial researches show it to be U-168, a hunter-killer of the German 'Kriegsmarine' which claimed several Allied vessels before it was sent to a watery grave by torpedoes in 1944.

A team found the wreck, which contains at least 17 skeletons, north of Java earlier this month after a tip-off from local divers.

'This is the first time we have found a foreign submarine from the war in our waters,' said Bambang Budi Utomo, head of the research team at the National Archaeology Centre which found the vessel.

'This is an extraordinary find that will certainly provide useful information about what took place in the Java Sea during World War II.'

As well as the human skeletons, dinner plates bearing swastikas, batteries, binoculars and a bottle of hair oil were pulled from the wreck.

He said further tests were being carried out on the objects to confirm the submarine was indeed 'U-168'. The sub was a type IX C/40 and was launched in March 1942.

Captain Helmuth Pich was its commander on four missions for the Third Reich. He survived with 26 other crew hands when it was lost on October 5 1944 under fire from a Dutch submarine. Some 23 men died in the attack.

Captain Pich lived until 1997 when he died at the age of 83.

In its three hunting expeditions for Allied vessels in wartime, his sub sunk one British, one Norwegian and one Greek freighter. Bambang Budi Utomo, head of the research team at the National Archaeology Centre that found the vessel, said it was unlikely the wreck, 60 miles (100 kilometres) northeast of Karimunjawa island, would be lifted from the seabed any time soon because of its sheer size and the cost involved.

U-168 was part of the Monsun U-Boats which were a group of vessels sent away from the German empire to attack allied ships along trade routes.

Japan occupied Indonesia during World War II, which was then still known by its colonial name of the Dutch East Indies. Germany and Japan were Allies until the end in WW2.

The Monsun U-Boats operated out of Penang, Jakarta and Sabang between 1943 and 1945. These U-Boats were sent to be based in the Far East stations provided by the Japanese but out of the 14 sent only four made it back to Europe.

It sailed from France in July 1943 and arrived at Penang in November of the same year.

U-168 was sunk at 1.30am on 6 October, 1944 in the Java Sea, by a torpedo from the Dutch submarine HrMs Zwaardvisch leaving 23 dead and 27 survivors.

Thursday 21 November 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2511249/Nazi-U-boat-sunk-Second-World-War-discovered-divers-Indonesia--complete-skeletons-doomed-crew.html

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12 gold miners dead in Guinea after collapse


Residents in a mining town in northern Guinea say at least a dozen people are dead after a landslide in the area where they were searching for gold.

Mamadou Diallo, who lives in the town of Siguiri, said Wednesday that eight others were feared dead and five people had been taken to the hospital with injuries.

A rescue operation was underway to try and find the eight who remained missing after the collapse early Wednesday but authorities said the hope of finding more survivors was slim.

Siguiri is located 435 miles (700 kilometers) north of the capital in this mineral-rich West African country.

Expert Mandjan Sano said that most of those searching for gold in the area are artisanal miners who often use outdated techniques that can cause fatal landslides.

Thursday 21 November 2013

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/12-gold-miners-dead-guinea-collapse-20950289

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Washington D.C. sees increase in unclaimed remains


A growing number of Washington DC-area families are failing to show up to claim loved ones who’ve passed away, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the News4 I-Team.

Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. health officials all reported spikes in the number of “unclaimed remains” being handled by local medical examiners.

The Maryland State Anatomy Board, which released records showing a 100 percent increase in “unclaimed” and donated remains since 2000, cited economic struggles for the surge.

Ronn Wade, director of the board, said families are increasingly unable to afford the costs of burial and are forgoing the pickup of remains at local medical examiners’ offices.

“There are families, because of circumstances, who don’t have the means to do pretty much anything," Ward said.

Virginia has experienced a 33 percent increase in unclaimed remains over the past year, according to documents reviewed by the News4 I-Team. The District's “unclaimed” remains jumped from 62 cases in 2010 to 97 cases in 2011.

Taxpayers are ultimately paying for the handling of those remains. Financial records obtained by the News4 I-Team show Maryland officials spent approximately $224,000 to handle hundreds of unclaimed and donated bodies between October 2012 and October 2013.

Rising homelessness, reported by homeless advocacy groups throughout the D.C. region, has also triggered in spike in unidentified remains at local health departments.

The homeless, a large number of whom do not carry identification, are difficult for authorities to connect with families. Rosemary Ward, a Germantown, Md. federal employee, spent eight years searching for the whereabouts and remains of her 32-year-old son, Matthew.

He died in an abandoned Baltimore rowhouse while living homeless in 2003, but was unidentifiable to authorities who recovered his remains. He was buried in 2006 alongside hundreds of other unclaimed or unidentified Maryland men and women at the state’s community grave site for the unclaimed at Springfield Hospital in Carroll County.

Ward finally learned of her son’s death in 2011 after reviewing the website MarylandMissing.com, which tracks unidentified bodies being processed by the state's health officials. Ward said the long wait was painful.

“Always not knowing and not having a sense of where he was," she said.

The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and its Sykesville-based mental health staff stage an annual burial ceremony for the “unclaimed” in June. Ward attended and spoke at one of the recent ceremonies.

“Matthew was with me for 32 years, so he’ll always be with me,” she said.

Thursday 21 November 2013

http://www.csnbaltimore.com/article/metro-dc-sees-increase-unclaimed-remains

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Typhoon Haiyan: Conflicting death toll, forensic process continues


The death toll from Super Typhoon “Yolanda” continued to mount on Wednesday as the group tasked with collecting cadavers from Leyte reported that they found 116 more dead bodies from various areas, many of them carried back from the waters of the San Juanico Straight.

Senior Supt. Pabilto Cordeta of the Bureau of Fire Protection, head of Task Force Cadaver, said the 116 new cadavers brought to 5,154 the number of bodies found in the wake of Yolanda.

Cordeta explained that a problem in tallying process was the reason behind its body count with that of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council whose official count was at 4,011 dead with 1,602 still missing and 18,557 injured, according to the disaster agency’s Situation Report No. 30.

But Cordeta said more bodies are being washed back to shore with Tacloban City and the towns of Palo and Tanauan being the hardest hit.

After the Palace disputed estimates that the death could reach 10,000, Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda again made a double-take on Wednesday and said the estimate that President Benigno Aquino announced in an interview was based only on areas already reached by government.

Meanwhile, forensic pathologists raced to identify the dead in Tacloban City.

Clouds of flies rise as forensic pathologist Cecilia Lim opens body bags one-by-one, in a grim but crucial search for the identities of unknown typhoon victims in the Philippines.

“Some of these remains, their faces are gone. We’re trying to do it as fast as we can before we lose everything,” says Lim, as a truck unloads 80 more dead at her workspace -- the edge of a mass grave outside the storm-shattered city of Tacloban.

A putrid stench rises from the giant pit where around 700 unevenly stacked bodies lie six deep, some of them having lain in the tropical heat for a week-and-a-half.

Scores more lie on the side of the road, lined up in bags and awaiting processing by small, overworked teams.

Lim says the aim is to record rudimentary details before they are buried in the hope that at some point, the bodies can be identified and placed in a proper grave.

“We are trying to do some initial victim identification and post mortem gathering of evidence before the bodies really decompose,” she says.

Many were recovered after being submerged for days in pools of water left by the tsunami-like storm surge that crashed into Tacloban when Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall on November 8.

As her assistant lifts the limp, wet clothes of each cadaver, Lim takes notes in neat cursive script in a reporter’s notebook, recording the sex and describing distinguishing marks.

Each hand is lifted to check for rings and the pockets are emptied, their contents inspected, logged and photographed.

Long, matted hair is scraped from one woman’s face, exposing her teeth so Lim can take a picture.

Crouching over the bloated body of one man, her knees just above the remains of his face, Lim unfolds a pair of spectacles taken from his shirt pocket, looking for a brand name on the arm before she refolds and photographs them.

“We document the clothes they are wearing, as well as any jewellery, tattoos or scars; something distinctive that people remember,” she says.

Cesar Pretencio rode his motorbike up from Tacloban in the search for his mother’s body.

“We had identified her and she was left in the chapel, but now she is gone,” he says.

“We want to know where she is so we can give her a proper burial.”

Lim nods sympathetically and tells Pretencio she will “keep an eye out” for his mother.

With the disaster known to have left more than 5,500 people dead or missing, the authorities are overwhelmed and Lim is just one of a handful of forensic pathologists who have been called in to help.

Those that are identified can be claimed by family and interred with the usual ceremony. The rest are taken to one of three pits like this.

The corpses are brought by firefighters who drive around the ruined city collecting the dead from among the debris of the storm surge.

“Yesterday we went out on the truck around Tacloban picking up bodies. We got 92,” Gallie Encabo tells AFP.

He is part of a group of 15 firemen who have come from the southern island of Mindanao to help with the recovery after one of the most powerful storms ever recorded.

The teams are being rotated among body collection, mass grave duty and water distribution.

“When the doctors have recorded the marks on the bodies for identification, we will put them in the ground,” he says, gesturing to the pit where a yellow excavator is digging a second trench.

This is the first time they have done body recovery on such a scale, says fellow firefighter Edgar Reyes.

“There are so many,” he says. “Yesterday when we stopped for one body, people would be shouting: ‘Hey, there’s one over here’.”

Lim, who trained in Detroit and Singapore, says that since she and other professionals started work on Monday, they have been trying to impose order on the burial process.

“Normal practice in a disaster like this is for the bodies to be buried in a single line, each one numbered so that they can be located easily,” she says.

“But lots of these have just been dumped in on top of one another. That will mean that we could have to dig up a lot of the grave to get at one body.”

Ideally, she says, they would like to do DNA tests so that scientists can match the dead with those looking for them. But the tests are not cheap, and with cadavers in such an advanced state of decay, not straightforward either.

“Because of the state of the bodies, we will have to get DNA samples from bones, and that isn’t easy.”

Despite a long medical career, Lim admits that dealing with so many corpses after a calamity like this is harrowing work.

“You go through all the training for a mass disaster,” she says. “But nothing can prepare you for this.”

Thursday 21 November 2013

http://manilastandardtoday.com/2013/11/21/death-toll-hits-5-154-on-day-12/

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No visual ID possible in Kazan plane crash


An official in Russia's Investigative Committee said "not a single body fit for identification by relatives was discovered" at the scene of an airplane crash at the airport in Kazan, Tatarstan.

Dmitry Zakharov said on November 20 that more than 1,000 fragments from bodies of the 50 people killed in the crash on November 17 have been sent for DNA testing.

Zakharov said the impact of the plane when it hit the ground was so intense it created a large hole in the tarmac and scattered debris hundreds of meters away from the impact site.

In a related event, a bill banning operation of commercial jets in service more than 20 years was submitted to Russia's State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

The Tatarstan airlines plane that crashed had been in service for 23 years.

Thursday 21 November 2013

http://www.rferl.org/content/no-visual-id-possible/25175089.html

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Interpol forensic team to help identify cadavers in Tacloban


A team of forensic experts from the International Police (Interpol) is set to fly to the typhoon-battered Tacloban City this weekend to help local authorities in identifying the decomposing bodies of those who were killed at the height of super typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan).

Justice Secretary Leila de Lima has met with the Interpol’s disaster victim identification (DVI) team, which will help the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) forensic team identify thousands of collected cadavers.

The Interpol team has experts from Canada, United Kingdom, Cameron, Jordan, Bosnia and South Africa.

“They said they’re willing to help and they’re willing to extend assistance and give advice to the whole process of DVI. This weekend, they will go to Tacloban City to make an initial assessment so that they will be able to craft or formulate proposals on how to go about the DVI given the magnitude of the casualties,” Sec. de Lima told reporters after her meeting with the Interpol team.

“That’s the initial team and depending on the exact process, I think more experts from the Interpol will fly to the country,” she said.

De Lima believed that Interpol’s assistance in the DVI operations would be very helpful, citing the same help extended by the international body during the “Princess of the Star” tragedy off Romblon in June 2008.

She also said that the integrity of the whole process of identifying the casualties will be ensured with the help of the foreign forensics experts.

“They (Interpol) explained that identifying the corpses is a tedious process. You don’t determine the identity of the dead bodies on the basis of their shirt or their belongings. So what is needed here, according to the Interpol, is a scientific process of identifying the bodies, like DNA testing,” the Justice Secretary explained.

“It will add further to the anguish of the family if you give them the wrong cadaver,” she said.

The first batch of 15 to 20 NBI forensic experts flew to Tacloban Tuesday last week. A second batch followed over the weekend.

De Lima revealed that the NBI forensic team is planning to set up apartment-type tombs to be able to identify an initial batch of 700 collected cadavers.

She said the ideal setup – as agreed upon by the Department of Health and volunteer private pathologists – is to put 10 to 20 corpses in a tomb.

De Lima has traveled to Leyte to supervise the forensic identification of the victims. The NBI had already appealed to the government for additional funds for the DVI since the NBI would need to spend about P15,000 to P20,000 per “specimen” or body.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted that it will be difficult to reconstitute the records of pending cases in courts that have been pummelled by super typhoon Yolanda.

“Our chance is to be able to reconstitute the records of the cases from the parties but that too will be difficult,” Prosecutor General Claro Arellano said.

The prosecutors’ office is housed at the Bulwagan ng Katarungan Compound in Tacloban, Leyte. Arellano said, a staff and wife of a prosecutor were reported to be among the typhoon fatalities.

The Office of the Prosecutors will resume work on Monday.

“We are preparing to send typewriters and other supplies to them,” Chief Prosecutors Association (CIPROSA) head and Manila Chief Prosecutor Edward Togonon said.

Thursday 21 November 2013

http://www.mb.com.ph/interpol-forensic-to-help-identify-cadavers-in-tacloban/

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