DNA analyzers to be installed at 4 police HQs

The National Police Agency has decided to install automatic DNA analyzers at four prefectural police headquarters offices to speed up the process of identifying victims in cases of large-scale disasters, NPA officials said Sunday. The automatic analyzers, which can examine a massive number of DNA samples, will be introduced by the local police in Hokkaido, Saitama, Osaka and Fukuoka by the end of March after work had to be done to conduct a large amount of DNA analysis in the wake of last year's disaster. The ability of the four analyzers roughly matches that of the existing analyzer at the National Research Institute of Police Science in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture. OSAKA, Jan. 29, Kyodo http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2012/01/138866.h...

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26 die in Peru rehab fire

(CNN) -- Twenty-six people were killed and 15 were rescued from a fire at a rehabilitation center in Lima, Peru, the state-run Andina news agency reported. The fire was controlled by firefighters by...

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Woman's body found in wrecked Italy cruise ship

Rome (CNN) -- A woman's body was found Saturday in the wrecked Costa Concordia cruise ship, Italian officials said, taking the number of people confirmed dead to 17. Rescuers have been searching the site since the massive liner struck rocks and rolled onto its side in shallow waters off an island on Italy's Tuscan coast on January 13, leading to a panicked overnight evacuation. At least 15 people remain missing. Efforts to remove 2,400 tons of fuel from the liner's tanks have been postponed until at least Tuesday because of bad weather conditions, Italy's civil protection agency said. The operation had been expected to begin Saturday or Sunday. Franco Gabrielli, who is heading the rescue operation for the civil protection agency, said Friday that 14 of the bodies found had been identified. The discovery of a 17th body came a day after a handful of surviving passengers of the wrecked Costa Concordia cruise ship filed a lawsuit against...

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Uruguay to Pay $513,000 Settlement in Rights Case

Uruguay's president has approved a $513,000 payment to Macarena Gelman, who was illegally adopted during the dictatorship after her mother was tortured and disappeared. The payment complies with an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling that accuses Uruguay of delaying justice for crimes committed by its dictatorship in the 1970s, according to a brief statement posted Tuesday on the presidency's website. Gelman's parents were kidnapped in Argentina and taken to a torture center notorious for being a nexus of Operation Condor, the effort by South America's U.S.-supported dictatorships to combine forces and eliminate opponents in each other's countries. Her father was then killed and her pregnant mother spirited to Uruguay, where she disappeared after giving birth in a military hospital. Decades passed before Macarena Gelman learned her true identity, as the granddaughter of renowned Argentine poet Juan Gelman. Macarena Gelman now...

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Unidentified bodies at police depot

SEVERAL graves of unidentified people have been discovered at Ntabazinduna Police Training Depot in Matabeleland North.Police said yesterday they were making efforts to identify the remains with the view of locating relatives. They said they were not sure of the number of graves at the two sites at the training depot since some were not visible. Some of the graves were first discovered in 2004 when the ZRP took over the area from the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture (now the Ministry of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Empowerment). It was still not clear whether some parts of the sites have mass graves. Speaking to the Governor for Matabeleland North Thokozile Mathuthu, Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri, Chief Neville Ndondo and acting Chief Ndiweni, the depot assistant commandant Superintendent Ben Chabata said they decided to protect the graves by fencing the two sites. "As a cultured organisation, we decided...

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Mass graves discovered in ZRP training centres

MASS graves have been identified in police training centers, it has been reported. The camps were previously used for national youth service. The development was revealed by Matabeleland North governor Thokozile Mathuthu at a police pass-out parade in Ntabazinduna Police Training Depot, 32km north east of Bulawayo, on Thursday. Superintendent Ben Chabata, the second in command at the training centre, asked the governor for resources to help identify who lies in the graves. He did not say when the discovery was made. Superintendent Chabata said they had identified two mass graves, which they had fenced off, but said police had no idea how many people were buried there. Police also had no means of determining how old the graves were. “After the discovery of the graves, and in an effort to build relations with the local community, we invited the local chief to come and view the place after we fenced it off,” Sup. Chataba said. “It is...

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Katyn families want remains brought back to Poland

Relatives of Polish officers murdered at Katyn in 1940 by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) have asked the Polish foreign ministry to request Russian authorites return their remains from Russia. Witomiła Wolk-Jezierska, Wanda Rodowicz, Krystyna Krzyszkowiak, Stanislaw Drabczyński and several others want their relatives' remains returned from where they are buried at Katyn and Miednoje, in present-day Belarus. The daily Rzeczpospolita reports that they sent a letter to foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski to this effect at the end of December. “I want finally to bury my father, lieutenant Wincent Wolk, in Poland. The state has an obligation to its own citizens and should help me,” Wolk-Jezierska told the daily. She says it is known exactly where her father is buried, at so-called Mogile IV in Katyn, a fact that was established when the German first exhumed the mass graves in 1943. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) started its investigation...

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U.S troops killed in action have a last ally

Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii (CNN) -- There is a skull here, hundreds of fragments of bones there. Table after table is lined with human remains. One holds a near-complete skeleton, another has hundreds...

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Brazil search of collapsed buildings intensifies; 7 dead

Sao Paulo (CNN) -- Brazilian rescuers intensified their search for victims in the rubble of three collapsed buildings in Rio de Janeiro Friday, though they are yet to find any survivors. Seven bodies...

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Sixty feared dead as entire village wiped out in Papua New Guinea landslide

Sixty people are missing and feared dead after an entire village was wiped out in a landslide in the Commonwealth country of Papua New Guinea. The flimsy village homes made of palm fronds and sticks...

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High-rise buildings collapse in Rio de Janeiro

Two buildings - one nearly 20 storeys high - have collapsed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, filling streets with masonry and covering cars with debris. Officials say up to 11 people are believed to be inside the buildings and five people have been rescued. The cause of the collapse remains unclear, but witnesses spoke of an explosion and a strong smell of gas. City Mayor Eduardo Paes said that they were focusing on rescue efforts before looking into the incident's cause. According to the BBC's Paulo Cabral, rescue workers were able to pull a cleaner from inside one of the elevators in the rubble after he managed to call a friend on his mobile phone. The buildings - located near the Municipal Theatre and the headquarters of oil giant Petrobras - crushed a four-storey construction site on their way down. The area surrounding the buildings is now covered in rubble, with several cars partially covered by debris. Dozens of emergency workers...

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Batang Kali relatives edge closer to the truth about 'Britain's My Lai massacre'

Lawyers representing relatives of 24 unarmed victims who died at Batang Kali, Malaysia, in December 1948 have finally been provided with key Foreign Office correspondence about past investigations and Cabinet Office guidance on when inquiries should be held. Even Buckingham Palace has been pulled into the furore surrounding the fate of the villagers, who were rounded up on a large rubber-tapping estate in the colonial government's counter-insurgency operation against communists, known historically as the Malayan Emergency. A petition to the Queen about the deaths has been handed to the British high commissioner in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, and the royal household has replied. The palace, however, has declined to release the text of the letter. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence have always insisted the villagers were shot while trying to escape detention. The incident has been described by some as the "British...

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Spanish families unearth their civil war dead

GERENA, Spain, Jan 24 (BSS/AFP) - The old people of the village still remember hearing the screams and gunshots through the olive trees of the cemetery one evening in 1937, at the height of Spain's civil war. Seventeen women, relatives of people on the Republican side, were shot by the forces of Francisco Franco and tipped straight into a mass grave. Now, 74 years on, their bodies are being exhumed so that their descendants can bury them properly. In a dark coincidence, the exhumation began on Monday, on the eve of the start of the trial of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon who is accused of breaking an amnesty by investigating just such atrocities in the Franco era. "It's paradoxical to say the least. It's also incomprehensible," said Lucia Socam, 25, whose great-aunt Granada Hidalgo was among the women buried in the mass grave. "They're going to try Judge Garzon for precisely this, for wanting to shed light on these crimes, which...

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Nigeria terror victims given mass burial

Abuja: Bodies of victims who lost their lives in the coordinated terror attacks in northern Nigeria were given mass burial on Wednesday at the village of Kalebawa on the outskirts of Kano city. Identified bodies were given to the bereaved families while those unidentified were conveyed from Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital mortuary to the burial site. Sources at Murtala Mohammed Hospital informed that over 50 bodies were carried in two vehicles for burial after the traditional ruler of Kano Emir Ado Bayero had led other emirs on a sympathy visit to the hospital. Earlier, the police gave a breakdown of death toll saying 150 civilians, 29 officers of the police, three members of the country's secret State Security Service, two officers of the immigrations' service and a customs officer were killed. The toll now stands at 185 though medical and humanitarian workers say the number may increase as more bodies are brought...

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A human body dug up from a mass grave in Ivory Coast

A male body was exhumed in one of the mass graves found in Yopougon district of Abidjan. It is still not known how many bodies there are in the graves. Locals residents claim the bodies are from a shooting...

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Remains of 23 people found in Turkey mass grave

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Turkish authorities found the remains of 23 people in a mass grave in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey on the former site of military police headquarters, Anatolia news agency reported Wednesday. The first remains were discovered earlier this month, during an archeological dig in Ickale, in central Diyarbakir, where ruins of an ancient palace dating back to the 13th century were being excavated. The area had been the site of a military police headquarters until the early 2000s. The eventual aim of the excavation is to carry out restoration work and turn the place into a museum and culture spot. Human rights activists claim the remains belong to civilian Kurds killed by security forces during 1990s. "Skulls and other bones belonging to humans were found here... According to what we saw they were piled up in a narrow place... They were apparently thrown there casually, without any religious ceremony," Agriculture Minister...

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Remains of child tsunami victim identified and returned to family

The remains of a five-year-old boy who died in the March 11 tsunami have been identified and were returned to surviving relatives on Jan. 24. The boy was the only known pre-grade school victim of either Miyagi or Fukushima prefectures who was still unidentified. According to Miyagi Prefectural Police, the boy's body was found off the coast of Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, in late April. Since June, the boy's ashes were being kept at Myokoin temple in Yamamoto, Miyagi Prefecture, where the head temple priest and nearby residents left toys and picture books as gifts. Miyagi Prefectural Police say that there were 12 requests from parents and other relatives for DNA comparisons against the boy's remains, and the 12th test came out a match, based on DNA test records of the mother, who also died in the disaster. The boy's ashes were returned to his grandparents and will be buried by his mother's ashes. Ryushin Miyabe, 29, a priest at Myokoin,...

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Trio of Hungarian fraudsters arrested after they 'tried to use Costa Concordia disaster to fake death of woman'

Three alleged fraudsters have been caught after using the Costa Concordia disaster to try and fake the death of a woman. Police in Hungary arrested the trio after New York lawyer Peter Ronai detected the scam as he represented the six Hungarian survivors from the disaster. The attempted fraud was spotted when Ronai, who was in Budapest, was asked to take on a seventh case from the disaster. He reportedly received an email from a woman that said her daughter, named as Eva Fiedlerne Puspoki, 38, and five-year-old granddaughter were missing aboard the ship. Ronai was told by the woman that she had no idea why the pair were on board and that he should speak to her daughter's boyfriend. The lawyer then questioned the boyfriend and he corroborated the story, but he also asked how much they could receive in compensation. However the following day the man changed his story, saying the child was not missing, and from there it began to unravel. 'The...

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Argentina helps search for missing in Viet Nam

Buenos Aires – The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) has helped Viet Nam confirm identification of people missing after wartime battles, said EAAF President Louis Fondebrider. The cooperative plan was established in October, 2010 following the Vietnamese Government's request for technical assistance on the issue, Argentinean press cited the EAAF president as saying. Last year, two EAAF experts came to Vietnam to provide training in forensic anthropology and identification of remains in Ha Noi and HCM City . The group also welcomed two officials from the Vietnam National Institute of Forensic Anthropology to gain experience at its headquarters in Cordoba province last December. According to Fondebrider, the two sides will cooperate in the search for the remains of missing soldiers and also confirm identification of natural disaster victims. Maria Mercedes Salado , who came to Vietnam to provide training , said Argentinean experts...

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Forensic Apps for First Responders

Law Enforcement Training and Resource Group LLC., (www.letrg.com) has come out with a new suite of applications for all smart phones. The suite is built around the needs of the first responder’s response to services calls. This suite is available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry smart phones and should be used with those phones with at least a 5 megapixel camera (for best results). The suite of more than a dozen different applications comes complete. The applications are divided into: tools, calculators, and evidence. Tools include a caliper, level (in degrees and percentage of slope), audio officer notes, field contact report, DOA notes, and References files. The three calculators included are Skid Mark Calculator (for minimum speed, Yaw, and friction factor), pictorial blood spatter trajectory calculator, and a pictorial digital dimension calculator. The evidence applications include two for photos (pre-scaled and scaled photo sets),...

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Big Tokyo earthquake likely 'within the next few years'

The chance of a big earthquake hitting the Japanese capital in the next few years is much greater than official predictions suggest, researchers say. The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude seven quake would strike the region in the next four years. The government says the chances of such an event are 70% in the next 30 years. The warning comes less than a year after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan's north-eastern coast. The last time Tokyo was hit by a big earthquake was in 1923, when a 7.9 magnitude quake killed more than 100,000 people, many of them in fires. Researchers at the University of Tokyo's earthquake research institute based their figures on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since the 11 March 2011 quake. They say that compared with normal years, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of quakes in the Tokyo metropolitan...

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'There's an overpowering smell of decomposition down there': Divers reveal 'unbreathable air' in Costa Concordia search as death toll rises to 15

Teams of naval officers, firefighters and coastguards said the air inside the ship, which capsized off an Italian island, was 'unbreathable'. Fire chief Enio Aquilino said: 'Imagine the scene if you went on holiday and you came back to find the fridge had switched itself off. The divers are working in those conditions.’ The grim conditions inside the vessel were revealed as two more bodies were recovered from the Costa Concordia today, bringing the confirmed death toll to 15. The two women were found in a submerged section of the ship, in the internet cafe and were located after further holes had been blown into the superstructure of the Concordia by navy divers. Tonight it emerged that one of the bodies found was that of Italian honeymooner Maria D'Introno, 30, who was on the cruise with her new husband Vincenzo Roselli and her in-laws, who were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. Maria, who could not swim, was thought to have...

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Costa Concordia disaster: Eight dead identified

Eight of the 12 people known to have died when the Costa Concordia cruise ship was wrecked last week have been identified, Italian officials say. Four of the victims were French, one was Italian, one Hungarian, one Spanish and one German, they added. Rescuers have resumed their search of parts of the ship above water, but choppy seas have prevented diving. At least 20 people are still missing. Officials say some people may have been on board without registering. The latest discovery was the body of a woman found on Saturday by divers on the fourth deck. The head of the Civil Protection Agency, Franco Gabrielli, said the woman had not been identified but may be a Hungarian who was not on the embarkation list. There could have been more "illegals" on board, he said, referring to people who had not registered to be on the ship. There were known to be 4,200 people on the cruise ship, which struck a rock in shallow waters on 13 January...

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Official: possibility of unregistered passengers

GIGLIO, Italy (AP) — Unregistered passengers might have been aboard the stricken cruise liner that capsized off this Tuscan island, a top rescue official said Sunday, raising the possibility that the number of missing might be higher than the 20 previously announced. Rescuers, meanwhile, resumed searching the above-water section of the Costa Concordia but choppy seas kept divers from exploring the submerged part, where officials have said there could be bodies. "There could have been X persons who we don't know about who were inside, who were clandestine" passengers aboard the ship, Franco Gabrielli, the national civil protection official in charge of the rescue effort, told reporters at a briefing on the island of Giglio, where the ship, with 4,200 people aboard rammed a reef and sliced open its hull on Jan. 13 before turning over on its side. Gabrielli said that relatives of a Hungarian woman have told Italian authorities that she had...

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Traditional Physical Autopsies – Not High-Tech 'Virtopsies' – Still the Gold Standard for Determining Cause of Death, Experts Claim

ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2012) — TV crime shows like Bones and CSI are quick to explain each death by showing highly detailed scans and video images of victims' insides. Traditional autopsies, if shown at all, are at best in supporting roles to the high-tech equipment, and usually gloss over the sometimes physically grueling tasks of sawing through skin and bone. But according to two autopsy and body imaging experts at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the notion that "virtopsy" could replace traditional autopsy -- made popular by such TV dramas -- is simply not ready for scientifically vigorous prime time. The latest virtual imaging technologies -- including full-body computed tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, X-ray and angiography are helpful, they say, but cannot yet replace a direct physical inspection of the body's main organs. "The traditional autopsy, though less and less frequently performed, is still...

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Health-Based Approach May Help ID Groups at Risk of Genocide

ScienceDaily (Sep. 19, 2011) — Researchers from North Carolina State University are proposing a health-based approach to identifying groups at high risk of genocide, in a first-of-its-kind attempt to target international efforts to stop these mass killings before they start. Genocide, or the willful attempt to exterminate a specific population, is a violation of international law. In recent years, international discussion of genocide has focused in part on finding ways to identify populations at risk in order to prevent a problem before it starts. Some risk factors have already been identified, such as severe state oppression of a group or a regional history of genocide. Now researchers are offering a new risk factor for consideration: a population's health and its track record of prenatal care. "This is a data-driven approach that we developed by analyzing the remains of genocide victims. There can be no confusion or claims of inaccurate...

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3 bodies exhumed in Turkey during investigation into alleged extrajudicial killings

ANKARA, Turkey - Authorities have exhumed the bodies of three Kurds as part of their investigation into alleged extrajudicial killings by Turkish security forces in the 1990s. The bodies were found Thursday in a village in southeast Turkey. Earlier this month, authorities made two other grim discoveries in the region: at least 15 skulls in a suspected mass grave at a military unit and former prison, and bones that appear to be those of humans buried at an operating Turkish military outpost. The nation's government has vowed to shed light on the alleged extrajudicial killings that occurred at the height of clashes with autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels, mostly in the southeast, in the 1990s. Human right groups believe many of the hundreds of Kurds and leftists who disappeared in the 1990s were victims of summary executions by government forces, but there have been few prosecutions. Turkey has been excavating alleged mass graves for the...

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Turkey exhumes bodies of three Kurds for probe

ANKARA: Authorities have exhumed the bodies of three Kurds as part of their investigation into alleged extrajudicial killings by Turkish security forces in the 1990s. The bodies were found on Thursday in a village in southeast Turkey. Earlier this month, authorities made two other grim discoveries in the region: at least 15 skulls in a suspected mass grave at a former prison and Turkish military unit, and bones that appear to be those of humans buried at an operating Turkish military outpost. The nation’s government has vowed to shed light on the alleged extrajudicial killings that occurred at the height of clashes with autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels, mostly in the southeast, in the 1990s. Human right groups believe many of the hundreds of Kurds and leftists who disappeared in the 1990s were victims of summary executions by government forces, but there have been few prosecutions. Turkey has been excavating alleged mass graves for the...

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Mangalore Air India Express crash victims bodies were misidentified - 8/8/2010

Thiruvananthapuram: The bodies of several of those who died when the Air India Express flight from Dubai crashed at the Mangalore airport on May 22 may have been misidentified by relatives, according to a paper published in the journal Current Science. The finding by scientists at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics in Hyderabad substantiate reports that have appeared in the media about such misidentification. The air disaster had claimed 158 lives, including the passengers and crew. The remains of 136 persons were handed over after close relatives identified them. But the remaining 22 victims could either not be identified or had rival claimants. The Centre, which had rushed two experts down to Mangalore on its own initiative and who used technique of genetic analysis to quickly put names to these as yet unidentified individuals. There was considerable pressure on us to deliver results because everybody was waiting, said...

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Canadian hair database will help forensic investigators identify bodies

University of Ottawa researchers Gilles St-Jean and Michelle Chartrand have spent years collecting and analyzing hair from across the country to build a database that will help forensic investigators identify unidentified remains. They hope to have the database up and running by the end of 2012. On television crime shows, there is already a database for everything, Chartrand says. “In reality, those databases don’t exist. That’s what we’re trying to build here.” And the clues to building this database are in the water. When water is consumed, it leaves a chemical fingerprint in hair. And because people tend to drink and cook with their local water, which can vary by region, the signature left on the hair will be geographically unique. “This is a new tool to help investigators who’ve hit a wall. Sometimes they have no idea where to look,” says St-Jean. “You can get DNA from a body that you’ve found, but if that person never wound up...

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No coherent mechanism used to identify crash victims bodies - 6/7/2010

MANGALORE: Twelve of the 158 passengers of the Air India Express flight killed in the May 22 crash here had to be buried in unmarked graves. According to the district administration, the 12 bodies could not be identified because of a mix-up. Some families took away the bodies that did not belong to them in the confusion that prevailed after the crash. The body of Mohammed Zubair Ziad (4) was taken away by a family that believed that it was the body of an adult. Tales of woe Narrating a similar incident, Vidya Dinker, an activist who was involved in the relief operations, said: One family had identified their kin and filled the claims form at the Wenlock Hospital. They then moved to another hospital to look for other relatives. By the time they came back, somebody else had taken the body. There was no coherent mechanism to identify the bodies, and some junior policemen were handling the process. Whereas, a senior police officer was managing...

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