Wednesday 5 November 2014

Fatal bus accident in Damanhur near Egypt Nile Delta


At least 18 people were killed when a bus packed with high school students collided with three other vehicles, including a tanker truck, in northern Egypt on Wednesday, medics said.

The crash, near the Nile Delta city of Damanhur, 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Cairo, also injured 18 people, some of them seriously, police and hospital officials said.

Medics were not immediately able to say how many of the dead were children because the bodies were so badly burned after the vehicles burst into flames.

The fire completely gutted the bus which had been transporting the teenagers to school. Scorched text books were scattered near the wreckage, shown in footage aired by Egyptian television.

Medics said three charred bodies, including that of a police officer, were pulled out of a sedan which was also involved in the crash. Provincial governor Mustafa Hadhud told Egyptian television that the bus had skidded after torrential rains struck the region.

One of the pupils who survived the crash said that the bus had arrived late and that the driver had explained "there had been a problem" with the vehicle.

"I was sitting in the back of the bus when the accident happened, and I jumped out of a window," the child told the private Egyptian CBC Extra in a telephone call from hospital.

Roads in Egypt are often poorly maintained and traffic regulations little enforced.

On Sunday, 11 female university students were killed in a collision in the south of Egypt. That accident sparked protests by fellow students in Sohag province.

Road accidents are responsible for an average of nearly 12,000 deaths a year in Egypt, according to the World Health Organization. Some of the deadliest accidents have sparked protests and accusations of government negligence.

After Wednesday's crash, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ordered the prime minister to visit the scene. He also gave instructions for the injured to be treated in military hospitals.

A cabinet statement promised "decisive measures to confront road accidents."

With roads poorly maintained and traffic rules often unenforced, Egypt can prove a dangerous place for transit. Road accidents cause an average of nearly 12,000 deaths a year in Egypt, according to the World Health Organization.

Wednesday 5 November 2014

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/egypt-school-bus-collides-tanker-18-dead-101755019.html#XQXUJVE

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Search continues for those missing from migrant boat


The death toll, which was initially announced as 20, climbed to 24 when more bodies were retrieved from the sea hours after the boat sank early Monday.

Ten of the 24 bodies retrieved from Monday's Bosporus boat accident belonged to children, according to a new statement by the Directorate General of Coastal Safety.

The 24 dead also included 10 men and four women, the statement said, adding that six migrants were safely rescued. A total of 43 people, including the boat's Turkish captain, were on board when the boat sank at the Black Sea entrance to the Bosporus Strait in İstanbul on Monday -- implying that 13 people remain missing. All 42 passengers were of Afghan origin. Search and rescue squads are still combing the waters to find the remaining 13.

The statement also said that Turkish authorities were alerted of the incident at 2:51 a.m. on Nov. 3 and search and rescue boats were immediately dispatched to the scene. They failed to find the endangered boat and returned to their base, however.

Five hours later, the directorate received a new call from fishermen regarding the same boat, which was three miles out at sea. Search and rescue efforts were once again initiated after the second call, according to the statement.

Local fishermen complained that their initial calls to the authorities for assistance were not fully investigated. They said rescue teams were dispatched to the area at around 8 a.m., after they made a second call saying there were multiple bodies in the water.

Darkness posed a challenge to efforts to locate those still missing and a Coast Guard vessel equipped to operate at night was the only ship used in search efforts on Monday night. More crews resumed the operations yesterday morning, combing the sea in the company of local fishermen and helicopters.

Many illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East pass through Turkey to get into the European Union, often traveling in unsafe boats.

The Bosporus strait, which bisects İstanbul, is one of the world's busiest waterways; it's a vital route for Russian oil and other commodities as it is the only outlet to the world's oceans from the Black Sea.

Turkish media reports that an aggressive crackdown by the Coast Guard against human traffickers and illegal immigrants in the Aegean Sea in Turkey's west coast has forced both groups to change their course and set out from Istanbul, a rarely preferred route. A large number of illegal immigrants were captured before they left several Istanbul ports aboard shoddy boats in the past month, but the 12-meter long boat that sank off Rumelifeneri managed to evade authorities. The media reported that smugglers were paid TL 7,000 ($3,153) for each person aboard and they charged migrants with extra fees for lifejackets. However, they turned out to be faulty, as corpses were found with lifejackets that were not inflated, according to accounts of eyewitnesses.

Experts and eyewitnesses attribute a number of causes to the accident, primarily overcrowding. Citing cracks on the boat's hull, some claim a bigger vessel crushed the boat since it was traveling without lights to avoid detection by the Coast Guard. On the other hand, locals claim smugglers deliberately sink boats after safely fleeing aboard another boat tailing the one carrying the illegal immigrants.

As the search continued, another case of migrants escaping death was reported yesterday in Marmaris, a southwestern Turkish town in the province of Muğla. Twelve illegal Syrian immigrants that were attempting to cross to nearby Greek islands aboard a small boat were stranded at sea, clinging onto the wreckage of their capsized boat, before Coast Guard officials rescued them. Turkish authorities also captured 33 illegal immigrants from Iraq, Syria and Myanmar yesterday in border villages of the northwestern Turkish province of Edirne as they attempted to cross into Greece and Bulgaria on foot.

Turkey, located in a region connecting Asia and Europe, is a main gateway for illegal immigrants pursuing a better life in European countries. Although strict security measures are taken on the borders, it still faces an influx of migrants who risk their lives and pay their scarce, hard-earned cash to smugglers for entry into Greece and Bulgaria, which border Turkey. Those who lost their lives in Monday's accident on the Bosporus were reportedly heading to Romania, located further away from Turkey's two neighbors.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said after the accident that illegal immigration was one of the basic problems facing both Turkey and the entirety of Europe, especially countries with coastlines facing the Mediterranean Sea. He said they would take all measures to stop illegal immigration so to prevent people from losing their lives.

Wednesday 5 November 2014

http://www.todayszaman.com/latest-news_10-children-among-victims-in-migrant-boat-tragedy-say-authorities_363629.html

http://www.dailysabah.com/nation/2014/11/05/search-continues-for-those-missing-from-migrant-boat

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Cyprus: Buried airplane must be dug up says ECHR


Cyprus must dig up the Nord Noratlas military transport plane buried at the Makedonitissa military cemetery in Nicosia or face sanctions from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), according to a memo sent by the Legal Services last week.

Per an out-of-court settlement with the relatives of Greek commandos Stefanos Tzilivakis and Kosmas Yiannakakis – who both lost their lives during the Turkish invasion in 1974 – the state agreed to recover the airplane to determine whether their remains were buried with it.

The plane was brought down by friendly fire while trying to land at Nicosia airport and all but one of the soldiers on board died. The soldiers were buried at the Lakatamia military cemetery in Nicosia and in 1979 their remains were sent back to their families in Greece.

DNA testing in 2003 showed that many of the remains were misidentified and that some of the bodies were never accounted for.

It is believed that some of the soldiers may be buried along with the plane.

Both the commandos’ families took Cyprus to the ECHR but settled out of court when the state said it would recover the plane and determine whether anyone was buried with it.

The matter became a cause of alarm for the Legal Services when the families’ lawyer contacted them asking that the recovery work starts immediately. According to the settlement, excavation should begin in 2014.

In a meeting that took place last week, chaired by Commissioner for Humanitarian and Overseas Affairs Fotos Fotiou, it was decided that the state go forth with recovery and that the Cyprus Scientific and Technical Chamber (ETEK) come up with ways of carrying out the recovery but limiting the damage in Makedonitissa.

The Makedonitissa cemetery is a war memorial, built on top of the Nord Noratlas plane.

“This is a totally manageable problem. We still have time to comply and state officials are very aware of the time limitations,” a government source told the Cyprus Mail.

Thanasis Zafeiriou was the only survivor of the plane that was shot down. According to his account, he managed to pry the plane door open before the plane was completely engulfed in flames and jumped out. He was later found unconscious by National Guard soldiers and taken to a hospital.

Wednesday 5 November 2014

http://cyprus-mail.com/2014/11/05/buried-airplane-must-be-dug-up-says-echr/

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Bone by bone, Ukraine identifies its war dead


Before the war, Oksana Biryukova’s lab helped investigators connect criminals to crime scenes. Now her equipment is buzzing around the clock trying to identify the charred remains of Ukrainian soldiers.

The DNA laboratory in the southeastern city of Zaporizhia is the only one in the country charged with creating genetic profiles for the unidentified bodies of Ukrainian servicemen killed in the conflict with pro-Russian separatists.

“These samples arrive every day,” Biryukova, the chief analyst at the interior ministry lab told AFP, nodding at brown boxes stacked in the corner of her gleaming white workplace.

“The full picture -- nobody knows it,” she said. “The 400 that we have handled is just some of the work.”

Trying to put a name to the remains of those killed in the seven months of brutal fighting in east Ukraine can be a difficult task.

Body fragments sent to Biryukova’s lab are often so degraded that specialists have to run tests several times, she said, showing vacuum-packed bones and a piece of jaw lying in an unassuming refrigerator.

“Most of the time we can only use bone tissue (to run tests) because samples come from people who have burnt almost completely.”

Even then, family clinging to hope that their loved ones are still alive sometimes refuse to give their DNA for testing.

Getting the bodies of those killed from the battlefield to the laboratory takes a lot of hard work. Commanding officers can no longer do it if the area has passed to hands of separatists.

Volunteer group Narodnaya Pamyat -- which works with the authorities to try to recover and return the remains of those missing -- estimates that more than 500 soldiers remain unaccounted for.

As military casualty figures spiked at the end of the summer, members from the organisation who have experience searching for World War II remains offered to help Ukraine’s overwhelmed military find those left behind.

But their operations are makeshift at best.

“The vehicles we have are junk on wheels, and de facto people do this work on their own money, on their own time,” says Konstantin, an army officer who helps put together search parties to scour rebel territory for the dead.

So far his groups have helped to recover some 160 bodies from the conflict zone.

Once a body is found the first obstacle is often the lack of any identification as Ukraine’s cash-strapped military cannot even furnish dog tags.

“Servicemen don’t have enough tags, and volunteer (fighters) never had them at all,” military expert Ivan Yakubets said.

Along with many other supplies, dog tags are now being made through crowd-funding initiatives.

The entire military operation in the east is so ill-equipped, it is “for the most part a partisan campaign,” Yakubets said.

When the bodies are finally brought in for analysis the morgues in cities closest to conflict zones often struggle with the scale of the job.

In Zaporizhia, about 170 kilometres west of rebel stronghold Donetsk, some of the bodies had to be buried before they could be identified last month after the morgue ran out of room, says Evgeniy Ksenzov, who works at the morgue’s forensic department.

Since then Ksenzov has received four giant refrigerators to keep the remains until they are claimed by their relatives after a genetic match.

At the cemetery in the outskirts of Zaporizhia, 54 anonymous graves lie in a dusty field, marked “unknown soldier” and adorned with wreaths, Ukrainian flags and children’s drawings.

Of the first 200 bodies that arrived in Zaporizhia in September -- many of them from the army’s defeat in the town of Ilovaisk -- these had not been claimed by relatives, Ksenzov said.

In total the United Nations says more than 4,000 people have been killed in the conflict since Apri.

Also still out in the fields are thought to be the remains of some 10 of the victims from downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was blasted out of the sky on in July over rebel territory, killing all 298 people on board. The others have been recovered.

While the burials of some of the unidentified servicemen have at least afforded them some dignity, the volunteers still searching for more remains fear for the other soldiers left lying in rebel-held areas.

Konstantin, who helps trying to track down remains, says there are areas that the recovery teams cannot enter.

Uppermost in his worries are those soldiers who perished on the territory of the so-called “Lugansk People’s Republic” (LNR), the smaller of the two rebel enclaves in the east.

There the insurgent leaders have refused to let volunteers take out the dead for more than a month, claiming they cannot guarantee security.

“In another month or two, there will only be bones that remain of the LNR bodies,” he said, approximating that there are between 100 and 200 bodies in LNR-controlled territory.

Wednesday 5 November 2014

http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=World&title=bone-by-bone-ukraine-identifies-its-dead&id=97311

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MH17: more human remains found at crash site


A Dutch team took advantage of a pause in fighting between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine on Friday to recover human remains from the Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash site, the Dutch prime minister said.

The remains were brought to the city of Kharkiv for a preliminary forensic check, after which they will be transferred to the Netherlands for further identification.

The findings were made after a mission in cooperation with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SES).

Mark Rutte said “the team recovered human remains from the so-called burn site” where the plane hit the ground, but he gave no more details.

It was the first time in weeks that Dutch authorities had been able to reach the area.

All 298 passengers and crew, two-thirds of them Dutch, died on 17 July when the aircraft was downed.

Kiev blames pro-Russian separatists for the airliner’s destruction. Russia says a Ukrainian military aircraft shot it down.

So far, 289 victims have been identified.

Security conditions were good enough on Friday for a small Dutch team, accompanied by members of the Ukrainian fire brigade and officials with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) officials, to search part of the crash site, Rutte said.

The remains would be sent back to the Netherlands for identification.

Tuesday 4 November 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/01/mh17-more-human-remains-found-at-crash-site-says-dutch-pm

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