Friday 27 February 2015

Mumbai railway cop gives dignity to unclaimed bodies


They may have had to lead their lives alone, but Nayna Devekar ensures that they have somebody with them at least on their final journey.

What’s more, Devekar makes sure that the last rites are conducted in strict accordance with the dictates of the deceased’s religion. Attached with the Kurla Government Railway Police since 2011, Devekar has laid more than 450 unclaimed bodies to rest, some of which were found on the city’s roads as well.

“On my first day with the GRP, a girl had died in a railway accident and nobody turned up to claim her body. After several days had passed, I decided to conduct her last rites according to the customs of her religion.

That experience touched my heart and I decided to ensure that the final rites are conducted properly for every person who dies in a railway accident,” said the constable. “Every day, I check the list of the people who die in railway accidents and later take custody of unclaimed bodies to conduct their last rites.

I believe that a railway accident is one of the worst ways for a person to die and I want to make sure that they don’t have to make their final journey alone,” she added.

‘Religion is key’

Devekar said she finds out the religion of the person with the help of the belongings found on the body. Once Devekar is sure of the deceased’s religion, she treats the body accordingly. She ensures that the body is taken to a crematorium if the person was a Hindu, to a burial ground for a Muslim, and so on.

“It is important not only for the last rites to be conducted, but for them to be conducted according to the religion of the deceased. During duty hours, I ensure that people do not cross the railway tracks and try to make them aware of the consequences, and conduct the funerals for the dead while I’m off duty.

People just don’t realise that they are playing with their lives by trespassing on the railway tracks,” said the constable. Devekar said that while most of the cost for the funeral is borne by the government, she bears the expenses of the things like ghee etc required for cremation and also pays small amounts to the workers involved. She said that she conducts the funerals before or after duty hours, depending on her shift.

Devekar’s superior, Deputy Commissioner of Police Rupali Ambure said, “We highly appreciate and admire her work and encourage her. She will be felicitated and given a reward on Women’s Day.”

Friday 27 February 2015

http://www.mid-day.com/articles/mumbai-railway-cop-gives-dignity-to-unclaimed-bodies/16021182

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Bangladesh ferry death toll rises to 79


The death toll in Bangladesh's MV Mostafa ferry disaster rose to 79, according to the latest official count of bodies recovered. On the river Padma, near Shivalaya Upazila sub-district, the motor launch Mostafa carrying over 200 passengers capsized after being hit on 22 February by the 330 gt cargo vessel Nargis-1, which was carrying fertiliser.

Shivalaya Upazila Nirbahi district executive officer Galiv Khan, also in charge of the ferry accident control room, told IHS Maritime this morning that nine further bodies had been recovered following the previous official count of 70 bodies on 23 February. He added that relatives have claimed 78 bodies. The unidentified body was transferred to the local hospital morgue.

The recovered bodies comprised 19 children, 25 women and 35 men, Fire Service control room manager Enayet Hossain confirmed to IHS Maritime.

Bangladesh Department of Shipping (DOS) officials estimate some 120 passengers were saved from the river by rescuers. The relatives of an estimated 20 passengers still reported missing are continuing the search for bodies in the Padma, a lower tributary of the Ganges. They have registered the missing persons' names with the police. Khan said he had received five names and the search for bodies continues.

Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority said the Mostafa was salvaged on 23 February using the salvage ship Rustam. The captain of the Nargis-1 has been arrested. A DoS team is now investigating the cause of the accident.

Friday 27 February 2015

http://www.ihsmaritime360.com/article/16874/bangladesh-ferry-death-toll-rises-to-79

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Planned Canadian DNA data bank to link missing persons with unidentified remains


Canada’s much-anticipated DNA data bank for linking missing persons with unidentified remains has been heralded as a powerful new tool to identify the nameless and help put killers behind bars. The Conservative government has also touted the data bank as a way to bring some closure to families of missing aboriginal women whose loved ones may, in fact, be dead – their unclaimed remains buried in unmarked graves or stored at coroners’ offices in cardboard boxes.

But a Globe and Mail investigation has found that plans for the data bank fall far short of the system in the United States, which American and Canadian experts deem a gold standard. This means fewer cold cases could be solved, fewer people could be identified and fewer criminals could be brought to justice.

The RCMP have not yet presented police agencies, coroners and medical examiners with a plan for the data bank, which passed into legislation last year and is expected to launch in the spring of 2017. But the federal police service revealed to The Globe that Ottawa will not pay for DNA testing in missing-persons and unidentified-remains cases, as Washington does. In Canada, it will also be up to police and death investigators to decide which types of DNA to profile, while in the U.S. a centralized lab always attempts to analyze two types. The Canadian approach means the country’s data bank will not be as well-populated or as consistent as the one in the U.S.

The DNA data bank will be of particular significance to the families of missing and murdered aboriginal women who are meeting in Ottawa on Friday, the same day as a national round table on violence against native women convenes in the capital.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rejected calls for a national inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women, saying the tragedies are not part of a “sociological phenomenon” but rather crimes best handled by police. His government has pointed to the data bank as part of its strategy to address the issue of violence against aboriginal women, who are far more likely to be killed or go missing than non-native women.

anada’s much-anticipated DNA data bank for linking missing persons with unidentified remains has been heralded as a powerful new tool to identify the nameless and help put killers behind bars. The Conservative government has also touted the data bank as a way to bring some closure to families of missing aboriginal women whose loved ones may, in fact, be dead – their unclaimed remains buried in unmarked graves or stored at coroners’ offices in cardboard boxes.

But a Globe and Mail investigation has found that plans for the data bank fall far short of the system in the United States, which American and Canadian experts deem a gold standard. This means fewer cold cases could be solved, fewer people could be identified and fewer criminals could be brought to justice.

The RCMP have not yet presented police agencies, coroners and medical examiners with a plan for the data bank, which passed into legislation last year and is expected to launch in the spring of 2017. But the federal police service revealed to The Globe that Ottawa will not pay for DNA testing in missing-persons and unidentified-remains cases, as Washington does. In Canada, it will also be up to police and death investigators to decide which types of DNA to profile, while in the U.S. a centralized lab always attempts to analyze two types. The Canadian approach means the country’s data bank will not be as well-populated or as consistent as the one in the U.S.

The DNA data bank will be of particular significance to the families of missing and murdered aboriginal women who are meeting in Ottawa on Friday, the same day as a national round table on violence against native women convenes in the capital.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rejected calls for a national inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women, saying the tragedies are not part of a “sociological phenomenon” but rather crimes best handled by police. His government has pointed to the data bank as part of its strategy to address the issue of violence against aboriginal women, who are far more likely to be killed or go missing than non-native women.

Canadian and American experts said it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the specific ancestry of a set of remains. Forensic analysis, including anthropological and dental, can provide solid hints, but authorities are loath to describe a woman as native when it is also possible she was Asian.

Although the whole picture is unknown, Canada’s unidentified dead include at least 11 women who were aboriginal or could possibly have been aboriginal: three in Ontario, three of Inuit ancestry in Nunavut, two in Alberta and one each in Yukon, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.

Little is known about their lives before they became Jane Does. One woman was found in a river in New Westminster, B.C., in 1991 wearing a gold wedding band. One homeless woman, perhaps from New Brunswick, died after choking on her vomit in a Toronto apartment in 1974. Another woman’s bones were found in 2006 strewn across a field in Mossleigh, Alta.; a farmer told police he had not seen the remains there the year before.

These women are among Canada’s 91 unidentified female remains. There are also 470 unidentified males and 136 cases where the sex is unknown. All 13 provinces and territories eventually provided data to The Globe, but several jurisdictions took more than three months to do so, some citing a lack of resources to collect the information. The 697 figure is not a complete tally, since it does not include very old or very recently found remains or, in the case of Ontario, newborns.

Canada is years behind the U.S. and the United Kingdom in identifying its anonymous dead. Both countries have national DNA databanks that store and compare genetic profiles from missing persons and unidentified remains. The American databank launched a full 15 years ago.

The Canadian government already has a National DNA Data Bank that includes profiles related to crime scenes and convicted offenders. Profiles related to missing persons and unidentified remains will be added. This genetics-based tool will help to ensure that if someone goes missing in one part of the country and is found dead in another, the link between the two cases could be made.

As part of its strategy to address the number of unsolved cases involving murdered and missing indigenous women, Canada launched a National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains in 2011. The centre, which maintains a website featuring cases across the country and runs a bigger, non-public database that searches for links, will support the DNA databank.

The RCMP does not track whether the centre has helped put names to the nameless thus far, so it is difficult to gauge its effectiveness. In part because the centre’s work has not progressed as quickly as Ontario expected, the province will this year revamp its own website featuring missing-persons and unidentified remains cases.

For more than a decade, victims’ families have been calling on Ottawa to create a DNA-based databank for missing persons and unidentified remains. Bill after bill, however, languished in Parliament as privacy concerns persisted.

The delay has been hard on those with missing loved ones, including Laurie Odjick, whose then-teenaged daughter, Maisy Odjick, disappeared with her friend Shannon Alexander in 2008 from a First Nations community in Quebec. “It’s frustrating, it’s maddening and it’s upsetting,” she said. “Out of respect for these human remains, they should be going home to their families.”

The delay may also have logistical and financial implications: Since most provinces and territories conduct DNA testing on a case-by-case basis, it is unclear how many of Canada’s existing unidentified remains will be retroactively tested to populate the databank – especially since the RCMP will not require coroners and medical examiners to go back and test remains for which samples have not already been culled.

Ontario, the province with the most unidentified remains in the country, has sufficient DNA profiles for 74 of its 239 remains. Any further testing will be costly and time-consuming, requiring the exhumation of bodies and the extraction of DNA from degraded samples. Alberta does not routinely do DNA testing of unidentified remains. An Alberta Justice spokeswoman said it is too soon to say whether the province’s medical examiners will participate in the databank. The province, which currently has 52 unidentified remains, first needs to see how the databank will function and what will be expected of death investigators.

The RCMP said it will let police, coroners and medical examiners decide what kind of DNA to submit to the national databank – nuclear, mitochondrial or both. In the U.S., a Texas-based centre, which is federally mandated to process missing-persons and unidentified-remains samples, attempts to get both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA in all cases.

Nuclear DNA is the more conclusive of the two when it comes to identification, but mitochondrial DNA has its advantages: It better withstands time and elements, and since it is passed down the matrilineal line between even distant relatives, it can fill a void if DNA from a missing person or their immediate family is unavailable for uploading into the databank.

Arthur Eisenberg, the director of the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, said consistently analyzing both types of DNA maximizes the potential for successful identification.

In the U.S., Washington pays for DNA testing for missing persons and unidentified remains samples sent to the Texas lab. Dr. Eisenberg said over the past decade, the lab received $10-million in federal funding primarily for DNA testing.

In Canada, federal dollars for the databank – $8.1-million over five years beginning in 2016-2017, and $1.3-million annually ongoing – will only go toward creating the databank and maintaining it. The RCMP told The Globe that police agencies, coroners and medical examiners will be expected to pay for genetic analysis at accredited labs.

Sergeant John Hebert, the head of Calgary police’s missing-persons team, is concerned about DNA costs remaining with police and death investigators. Without federal funding for the actual testing, he suspects fewer cases will be profiled and that the effectiveness of the databank could be reduced. It is possible that not much will change from the status quo, he said. He pointed to the American approach as a model he hopes Canada will emulate, saying it “has had tremendous success.”

For Bernadette Smith, whose sister, Claudette Osborne, went missing in Winnipeg in 2008, waiting to learn whether her sibling’s DNA matches any of Canada’s unidentified remains is difficult. It is Ms. Smith’s understanding that her sister’s DNA was entered into the American databank years ago.

“We know there’s a possibility of her not being alive, but we don’t let go of the hope that she might walk through the door,” Ms. Smith said. “If she’s out there somewhere, unidentified, then whenever this database gets put together, we’ll have some questions. Why wasn’t this done sooner?”

Friday 27 February 2015

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/planned-canadian-dna-data-bank-will-fall-short-of-gold-standard-as-tool-in-search-for-missing-indigenous-women/article23221815/

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Afghanistan avalanche dead crosses 200


At least 100 more people were reported dead in avalanches in northern Afghanistan on Thursday, bringing the total death toll since Wednesday morning to at least 230 people, Afghan officials told.

The northeastern Panjshir province is so far the worst-hit area in the country, where authorities recovered 86 more bodies Thursday, bringing the toll since Wednesday morning to 186 in this province alone according to provincial police chief Gen. Aziz Ghairat

Ghairat said that there were more than 100 others who had suffered injuries in the avalanches and heavy snowfall in the area. He added that there were at least 100 others missing in the area.

"Several villages, including provincial capital were hit by avalanches; two villages totally disappeared from the face of the earth," Ghairat said.

He added that local aid workers and those sent by the central government were able to so far open only 18 kilometers of roads that connect the provincial capital with local districts.

Afghan Defense Ministry officials said that choppers at their disposal were unable to land on most of the avalanche-hit areas of Panjshir.

A provincial police spokesperson in northeastern Badakhshan province told AA on Thursday that at least 18 people were killed when an avalanche hit a remote village. Earlier this week, 10 people had lost their lives in avalanches in the same province.

Afghanistan’s Natural Disaster Management Authority's senior official Mohammad Aslam Sayas on Thursday told AA that emergency assistance, including medicines, food, tents and warm clothes were sent to disaster-hit areas.

"Apart from avalanches, heavy snowfalls and floods have caused human losses and destruction in several provinces, including Panjshir, Nangarhar, Laghman, Kapisa, Parwan, Nuristan and capital Kabul," Ayas said.

At least eight people, including women and children were also killed in heavy rains and snowfall in eastern Nangarhar and Laghman provinces, he added.

It is feared that there are scores more dead buried under the snow, which authorities are yet to discover.

On Wednesday, 13 people were reported dead in avalanches in Parwan province and five others in central Bamyan provinces.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in a statement offered condolences to the victims’ families and ordered authorities to do their best to help the people in the disaster-hit areas.

The Afghan national cricket team also dedicated their shock victory Thursday against Scotland at the ongoing cricket world cup in New Zealand to the Afghan victims.

Local Afghans along with government workers have been carrying out rescue operations in the disaster areas since Wednesday morning. Fazul Rahim, a local from Khenj district, told AA Wednesday via phone that at least 13 people were killed in his single village alone; two of his cousins were among the dead.

"We have discovered the bodies, but cold weather and snow-covered ground is not allowing us to bury our loved ones," Rahim added.

The Salang Tunnel Pass, which connects Afghanistan's northern provinces with the southern provinces remains closed because of more than 70 avalanches that have hit the country since Feb. 24.

Afghan capital Kabul and adjacent provinces, too, continue to suffer with many areas facing severe power shortages because of storms and heavy snowfall giving no respite to the war ravaged Afghan people.

Friday 27 February 2015

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/180876/no-respite-for-afghanistan-as-avalanche-dead-crosses-200.html

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