Tuesday 23 December 2014

One more body recovered from village Saddal in Udhampur


The rescue teams today recovered one more body of a woman, among 40 persons who got buried in landslide hit village Saddal in Udhampur district during flash floods on September 7.

"One more corpse was recovered today in the rescue operation launched by the Udhampur district administration to retrieve dead bodies of the missing persons in landslide hit Saddal village of Pancheri block," police sources here said.

They identified the recovered body as Lila Devi (40) wife of Girdhari Lal.

"With the recovery of this body, so far 30 dead bodies have been recovered from the Saddal hamlet while 10 persons are still missing under the debris of massive landslide, which hit the village on September 7," they added.

Tuesday 23 December 2014

http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/India/20141222/2516156.html

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Another family joins lawsuit against JPAC for recovery of remains from WWII


Another family has filed suit against the Defense Department POW/MIA accounting agencies seeking the identification and return of remains.

Sally Hill Jones — niece and next of kin of a missing World War II Army Air Forces B-24 gunner — filed suit without the assistance of an attorney on Dec. 4 in a Texas district court, according to documents. Jones seeks to join John Eakin in suing the government over remains she believes could belong to her uncle, Staff Sgt. Carl Holley.br>
Holley was one of 10 reportedly killed on April 18, 1944, when the B-24 bomber “Sweepy-Time” Gal was shot down by Japanese Zeroes off the coast of Hong Kong. Four bodies were recovered after the crash, and three allegedly have been identified, according to Jones, former Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command investigators and accounting documents. br>
The unidentified remains were buried at Hawaii’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, called the Punchbowl, until 2005, when they were exhumed by JPAC.br>
The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory have tried to use DNA testing to identify the remains but have been unable to do so, according to internal emails and documents. br>
In 2012, after years of JPAC denials, Eakin sued for the remains of his cousin, Pvt. Arthur “Bud” Kelder, who, evidence suggested, was buried as an unknown in the Philippines. As a result, the Defense Department exhumed 10 sets of remains in August and is actively working to make identifications. br>
Jones said she had been pursuing the case since 2001, but couldn’t get answers until she filed her lawsuit. The accounting community finally responded to her, but she was not satisfied. br>
The government has until Jan. 16 to respond to her suit, according to U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Daryl Fields. br>
“I don’t have faith in JPAC to make the ID, given their track record,” Jones said. br>
She hoped that by suing, she could open the door for other families.br>
“I’d like to see an attorney take this on as a class action,” she said. “There are a lot of older folks whose siblings died in World War II, and they don’t know what happened to them. But they could know. It’s heartbreaking.”br>
Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, of the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, declined to comment in an email to Stars and Stripes, citing the ongoing litigation.br>
However, Jones provided documents and emails to Stars and Stripes that show the JPAC-CIL and AFDIL are using an untested, next-generation mitochondrial DNA approach with the remains. They believe they have a result, but the procedure hasn’t been validated yet. br>
Jones has been told the validation and an identification could come early next year.br>
Mark Leney, JPAC’s former DNA manager, who is now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, had undertaken the case before he left JPAC in 2006. He said the remains appeared to have been treated with a chemical — possibly formaldehyde — that made the identification difficult at the time. However, he believed that issue had been resolved in recent years by technological advancements.br>
“That was eight years ago,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like they’ve gone very far.”br>
Leney said mitochondrial DNA testing is “not a very strong method” in making identifications and works best in exclusions. br>
Jones started her quest for an ID more than a decade ago. Her mother has since died.br>
Louis Mroz, younger brother of 2nd Lt. John Mroz, who also died in the plane crash and is one of the seven missing, had been leading efforts to compel the government to make an identification but is now 86 and in poor health. He said he has been turned away by JPAC several times when seeking answers. br>
“I’d like to see some new sources of information,” he said. br>
Jones hopes her suit can spur identifications before the memories fade — like Mroz’s recollection of his brother building him a P-40 Warhawk model airplane just before he shipped out.br>
“He was quite a guy,” Mroz said of his brother. “He always had time to help me. … I’m 86 years old, but the memories are still fresh in my mind.” br>
Tuesday 23 December 2014 br>
http://www.stripes.com/news/another-family-joins-lawsuit-against-jpac-for-recovery-of-remains-from-wwii-1.320590

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10 years after tsunami, victim's mom learns body wasn't lost


Of all the moments to chase a dream, May Aye Nwe chose the morning of Dec. 26, 2004.

A child of rural Myanmar, she boarded a small boat seeking a better life in Thailand, just as the Indian Ocean tsunami raced in.

Ten days later, her mother got a phone call that her 20-year-old daughter had died, and apparently vanished at sea in one of modern history's worst natural disasters.

It took her nearly 10 years to learn the truth. Her daughter's body had in fact been recovered after the tsunami and was buried in an anonymous grave. It lies today beside more than 400 unclaimed bodies at the Tsunami Victims' Cemetery in southern Thailand, a memorial to the disaster's forgotten victims. The tombstones are marked with numbers, not names.

An Associated Press investigation helped track down two families with loved ones at the cemetery, including May Aye Nwe's mother. As the 10th anniversary of the disaster approaches, Aye Pu, now a 55-year-old widow, says her healing process can finally begin.

"For so long, I believed my child was lost," said Aye Pu, her eyes filled with tears, during an interview at her remote village in Myanmar's southern Karen state, where she taps rubber trees for a living. "It's impossible to put into words how very sad - and very happy - I now feel."

The discovery has rekindled emotion and memories of her daughter, a bright star in a family of farmers who was on the cusp of a new life.

May Aye Nwe dreamed of becoming a nurse and set off for Thailand to earn money, as do so many of Myanmar's poor. She and a childhood friend, Khin Htway Yee, traveled 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from their village to the country's southern tip. At about 10 a.m. on Dec. 26, 2004, they boarded a boat to cross a tiny patch of the Andaman Sea to Thailand, a trip that takes about 15 minutes.

Earlier that morning, a magnitude-9.1 earthquake tore open a vast stretch of sea bed off Indonesia's Sumatra coast. It displaced billions of tons of water, sending waves roaring across the Indian Ocean, in some places at jetliner speeds. It killed about 230,000 people in 14 countries. More than 5,000 died on Thailand's Andaman Sea coast, where the waves swallowed resort beaches and flattened fishing villages.

Khin Htway Yee, who survived, said the calm sea turned violent a few minutes into the boat ride. She and May had never seen the ocean before, and didn't realize the waves were unusual.

The boat flipped and there was panic, screaming, struggling. Khin Htway Yee, now 31, remains haunted by her friend's desperate last moments.

"We were grabbing at one another," she said, speaking in the shade of her friend's family home. "She tried to pull me, but finally I had to push her away.

"There was nothing I could do. I was struggling for my life, and I couldn't save her," Khin Htway Yee said. She said she survived by holding onto a plastic container bobbing in the water.

After an hour at sea, she struggled ashore with one goal: To evade arrest. She had entered Thailand illegally and was too afraid to report what had happened to authorities. She disappeared into the illegal workforce and stayed two years in Thailand before returning home and starting a family.

May Aye Nwe's story helps explain why there are 418 unclaimed bodies at the Tsunami Victims' Cemetery, in the town of Ban Bangmuang. Experts believe most of those buried are migrant workers from Myanmar, also known as Burma, who came to do the jobs that Thais shun. Then, as now, many were working in the area illegally and had no documents. When they died, no one knew who they were, and those who did know were too scared to go to authorities.

"I believe that over 90 percent of these bodies are Burmese migrant workers," said Htoo Chit, a human rights advocate for Myanmar migrants, during an interview at the cemetery. "Many migrants who lost their loved ones, they were afraid of being arrested and deported. That's why there are so many bodies here."

The cemetery was created after a massive operation by international forensics experts to identify and repatriate victims was completed.

As part of the AP investigation, reporters sifted through more than 100 documents, finding mostly single names that led nowhere and non-working phone numbers. Some have DNA data but most have little beyond a reference number. Their gravestones are concrete blocks with metal plaques that bear a reference number.

May Aye Nwe's reference number was PM66-TA1415. It is unclear why she went unidentified because her body was found with her national identity card __ which AP used to find her village, and then her mother.

While most of the bodies in the cemetery will probably never be identified, one other family now has a degree of closure, after 10 years of waiting.

On a sunny morning last month, the body of Bhesraj Dhaurali, a tailor from Myanmar of Nepalese descent, was exhumed from the cemetery and cremated with Hindu rites, after the AP investigation traced police records to his family.

The ceremony was attended by his 19-year-old son and 20-year-old daughter. They were still in Myanmar when the tsunami killed both their parents, who had gone to Thailand to work. The son and daughter have followed in their footsteps, and now live in southern Thailand.

"If I could speak to my father today, I would ask him why he left us so early," said the daughter, Dipa Dhaurali. "It has been so many years. But after being able to see this with my own eyes, in a way it gives me some joy."

May's mother is too poor to travel to Thailand to retrieve her daughter's body, or to pay to have it brought home. She hopes the body can be cremated in line with Buddhist customs.

"I'm not angry. I don't blame anyone. I want to thank those who kept her body," Aye Pu said, sobbing. "This was my daughter's fate."

Monday 22 December 2014

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/12/22/10-years-after-tsunami-victims-mom-learns-body-wasnt-lost/21119699/

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