World War I diggers named

Nine more World War I diggers have been identified out of more than 250 found in a mass grave at Fromelles, along with two Australian special forces troops killed in the Dutch East Indies in World War II. Revealing the names of the soldiers in a statement on Saturday, Veterans Affairs Minister Warren Snowdon said the total number of those identified from the Battle of Fromelles now stood at 119. A further 92 Australians remain unidentified, along with two British soldiers and a further 37 whose graves are marked 'Unidentified Soldier of the Great War'. 'We are encouraged by the success, made possible by the large number of extended family members, both in Australia and Britain, who have provided DNA samples to assist with identification,' Mr Snowdon said. Fromelles was the first major action involving Australian troops in France in World War I. It was fought over July 19-20, 1916 and resulted in more than 5500 Australian casualties....

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Government to Hold Mass Burial For Sinai Victims

A mass burial will be held next week for the Sinai fire victims who were burnt beyond recognition. The unidentified bodies and those burnt beyond recognition will be interred at the Lang’ata cemetery. The DNA testing of the victims was conducted against samples of the people who lost their loved ones. Speaking to media on Friday, Special Programmes PS Andrew Mondoh said that 15 bodies have so far been positively identified and will be given to family members for burial. “So far because of the severity of the burns and the inhalation injury in burns some of the survivors have become so sick, we lost five more survivors on Wednesday night,” she said. 15 bodies have been positively identified and the families will be given the go ahead to burry them although the government will meet the all the costs of transporting the bodies and the burial. More than 90 patients are nursing injuries at the Kenyatta National Hospitals and other hospitals...

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Witness Details Srebrenica Mass Graves Study

Former investigator describes complexities of identifying human remains from various sites. The trial of former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic continued this week with testimony from a former prosecution investigator about the research done on mass graves dating from the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. Karadzic is accused of planning and overseeing the murder of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. The indictments against him include genocide, extermination, murder, persecutions and other crimes against humanity and war crimes. A high percentage of the Srebrenica victims have been identified from the remains found in mass graves. This week’s witness, Dusan Janc, is a police inspector in Slovenia. As he told the court this week, between 2006 and 2009, he served as an investigator the Hague tribunal’s Office of the Prosecutor, studying mass graves and the Srebrenica victims they contained. The witness...

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Thirteen dead in new Honduras prison fire

Tegucigalpa. At least 13 people were killed Thursday in a fire at a prison in Honduras, officials said -- less than two months after a deadly prison blaze killed more than 350, AFP informs. "There are 13 bodies. We have not yet been able to identify the circumstances of the incident" at the San Pedro Sula prison in the north of the country, said Marleny Vanegas of the city prosecutor's office. "We will have to await the results of the investigation." Earlier, police spokesman Walter Amaya had put the death toll at one. Officials said the fire was rapidly brought under control. Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla said the fire at the facility -- which was built for 800 inmates but which currently has 2,250 -- had "once again highlighted the critical situation" in the country's prisons. A horrific fire erupted on February 14 at a prison in Comayagua, some 90 kilometers (55 miles) north of the capital Tegucigalpa. The incident, in which...

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Documents show debate over handling of 9/11 remains

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cremated remains that may have included those of victims of the September 11 attacks were incinerated and sent to a landfill despite an internal debate in which some officials at the main U.S. military mortuary recommended the ashes be dispersed at sea. Documents released on Friday show that nearly one year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, military and civilian personnel responsible for the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware engaged in an lengthy e-mail exchange over what to do with 1,321 portions of remains. The fragmentary remains, which were categorized as "Group F," were unidentified and could not be linked to any specific victim of the September 11 attack on the Pentagon. They were mixed in with debris from the building and airplane, and could have included remains of the hijackers as well, an official said on Friday, adding that it was not even certain they were human. "They could have been...

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Seven soldiers die in Venezuela helicopter crash

CARACAS, VENEZUELA (BNO NEWS) — A military helicopter crashed Thursday morning during an operation against drug traffickers in southwest Venezuela, killing all seven crew members on board, officials at the country’s Ministry of Defense said. The accident happened at around 5:15 a.m. local time when the Super Puma 2216 aircraft, belonging to the Venezuelan Air Force, went down in a field near Yagual in the country’s state of Apure near the border with Colombia, approximately 600 kilometers (372 miles) southwest of Caracas. The press office of the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense confirmed all seven crew members were killed in the crash, which happened while the helicopter was taking part in a military operation against drug traffickers in the region. The cause of the accident was not immediately known. The victims were identified as pilot Captain José Ramón Garrido Salcedo, co-pilot Lieutenant Carlos Eduardo Martínez Salvatierra, Major...

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French, German victims of Italy shipwreck identified

Rome: The bodies of a young French couple and three German tourists on board the shipwrecked Costa Concordia cruise liner have been formally identified, local authorities said in a statement on Tuesday. Officials also identified the bodies of a five-year-old Italian girl, Dayana, and her father Williams Arlotti. The corpses were recovered earlier and were among the 32 people believed to have died in the January 13 tragedy. The families of the French couple, 25-year-old Michael Blemand and 23-year-old Mylene Litzler, have been in Italy for weeks awaiting news of their loved ones and visiting the scene of the disaster on Giglio Island. In a last text message to their families sent the night of the disaster, Blemand and Litzler said they had put on their life jackets and were boarding a lifeboat. Their relatives have said they cannot understand what happened and have voiced frustration with the lengthy process of identifying the bodies....

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Two more bodies recovered from Costa Concordia cruise ship

(AGI) Florence- Two of the 5 bodies identified on March 22 have been recovered from the Costa Concordia cruise ship. The announcement pertaining to the recovered bodies of the victims came from the office of the appointed commissioner for the emergency arising from the wreck of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia. Operations are being run by the scuba units of the National Firefighters' Corps, the Military Marines' Operational Divers Group and the Coast Guard and State Police's diving units. 13:39 26 MAR 2012 http://www.agi.it/english-version/italy/elenco-notizie/201203261339-cro-ren1043-two_more_bodies_recovered_from_costa_concordia_cruise_s...

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Two deaths reported after Tuesday’s earthquake in Mexico

ACAPULCO, Mexico (BNO NEWS) — Two deaths were reported on Friday after a powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck southwestern Mexico on Tuesday, damaging tens of thousands of houses. The first victim, identified as Ernesto Bernal Ruiz, died after being crushed by a falling wall in the small community of El Tamale in Guerrero state. In a separate incident, 90-year-old Juan Chute Bruno from San Nicolas, also in Guerrero, died of a heart attack caused by the earthquake. In addition to the fatalities and 11 people who were previously reported injured, at least 15,000 people have lost their homes in the state of Oaxaca, where damages caused by the earthquake are estimated to succeed 90 million pesos ($7 million). In Guerrero, Governor Ángel Aguirre Rivero requested assistance to provide 10,000 residential homes for those affected, as well as 20,100 reconstruction packages for damaged homes. According to the United States Geological Survey’s...

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Japanese boat washed away in tsunami spotted more than a year later

(CNN) -- A fishing trawler swept away more than a year ago by a tsunami off the east coast of Japan has been spotted floating near British Columbia, Canadian officials said Friday. "It looks fairly...

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Poland exhumes some 2010 plane crash victims

WARSAW, Poland — One autopsy report describes organs that had been removed years before. Another adds 20 centimeters (nearly 8 inches) to a short man, making no mention of bones disfigured by childhood polio. One family doubts whether an autopsy was performed at all. Polish investigators have exhumed the remains of three of the 96 Poles killed in the 2010 plane crash in Russia that killed President Lech Kaczynski due to flaws in the initial autopsies performed by Russian officials. The need for the new autopsies has added to suspicions held by some Poles that the Russians were, at best, sloppy in their handling of the crash aftermath, and, at worst, trying to cover something up. Russian authorities say any inaccuracies result from the fragmented state of the bodies after the crash. Two of the 96 bodies were exhumed this week in Poland, following a first such exhumation August. Victims' families and officials say other victims also have...

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Victims in Mexico mass graves could be ID'd with new software from Spain

MIERES, SPAIN -- A new tool developed in Spain may help authorities in Mexico identify hundreds of human skeletal remains suspected of being the victims of organized crime. The European Centre of Soft Computing, based in Mieres, plans to send its new software Skull2Face later this year to several states in northern Mexico and other countries. "We have been in talks with officials of Chihuahua state about the possibility of using this software to help them identify the skeletal remains of men and women," said Sergio Damas, one of the principal researchers of the software developed by the center and the University of Granada. "Officials from other states in Mexico also are interested in acquiring five to 10 sets of the software system." The price for the software has not been determined. Earlier in March, 25 experts from around the world met in Mieres to learn more about Skull2Face software, which its creators say will revolutionize forensic...

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Chixoy Dam-Rio Negro Massacres: Justice Delayed 30 years and Counting

As part of an all night Mayan ceremony (March 13-14, 2012), a Mayan priest reads off, page after page, the names of each and every one of the close to 450 Mayan Achi children, women and men from the remote village of Rio Negro, victims of the 1982 "Rio Negro massacres." Along with a delegation of Americans and Canadians, I have come here to spend the night and participate in commemoration activities on the 30th anniversary of the March 13, 1982 massacre of 177 children and women, this being the second of four large scale massacres in 1982 carried out in conjunction with the Chixoy Dam "development" project. PROFITS & IMPUNITY FOR THE WORLD BANK & INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK From 1975-1985, the World Bank (WB) and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) spear-headed this "development" project, investing 100s of millions of dollars into the Guatemalan military regimes of those years. The 1982 Rio Negro massacres (February 12,...

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Srebrenica: Three More Bodies Found

The Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons recovered the remains of three war victims from a mass grave near the village of Suceska, in Srebrenica municipality. According to information from the Institute for Missing Persons, the remains are probably those of men killed in July 1995 in Srebrenica. The remains were transported to the Commemorative Center in Tuzla for analysis and identification. On the same day, the remains of another victim were found near Sanski Most in northwestern Bosnia. The Bosnian state prosecution, which has national responsibility for exhumations, said that the remains would be sent to the Sejkovaca mortuary for identification. Representatives of the Institute for Missing Persons and police officers from both Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina participated in the exhumations in Srebrenica and Sanski Most. According to available information, at the end of the conflict in Bosnia an...

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Mexicans criticised for removing bones from archaeological site

San Cristobal de Las Casas (Mexico), March 15 (IANS/EFE) Mexican authorities’ decision to remove human skeletons from an archaeological site in the southern state of Chiapas resulted in the loss of “invaluable” anthropological information, experts said. “We obviously understand the haste, the importance given (to the find by) the state Attorney General’s Office considering the fight against drug trafficking,” Emiliano Gallaga, who represents the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, in Chiapas, told EFE. Chiapas authorities, who had initially assumed the bones were the remains of victims of organized crime, informed INAH of the discovery but only after the material had been collected, Gallaga said. The state government announced March 9 the discovery of 167 human skeletons in a cave thanks to “intelligence work” directed by the Chiapas AG’s office, whose experts erroneously calculated that the human remains were about...

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Yingxiu rises from the ashes

We arrived in Yingxiu town on a chilly early spring day full of misty rain, when snow still covered the tops of the surrounding mountains. From the distance, the town looked like it was from a fairy tale, though from close up it appeared to be carefully planned, with new villa-style residences lining the Yuzi River. It certainly didn't look like I expected one of the hardest hit towns in the 2008 quake to appear. It lost the majority of its population of 12,000. Its traffic and communications were cut off. And dangerous landslides and bad weather initially prevented rescuers from arriving. Four years after the devastation, locals' hearts appear to have healed, and traces of the quake are hard to find unless local guides show you around. Several sites that were affected by the earthquake have, however, been preserved as memorial sites, including the ruins of the primary school, where hundreds of students died. This approach has been duplicated...

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Dutch soldiers find suspected WWII mass grave in dunes

TILBURG, the Netherlands (BNO NEWS) — Dutch soldiers have possibly found a mass grave which may contain the bodies of up to fifteen people who were executed by German police during World War II, the government announced on Wednesday. The Dutch Ministry of Defense said a group of soldiers discovered two suspected graves last week while searching the Loonse and Drunense Dunes, a national park located between the cities of Tilburg, Waalwijk and Den Bosch, with ground-penetrating radar. It is believed up to fifteen people may be buried there. “After an afternoon of intensive research, soldiers from the 41st Armored Engineer Battalion discovered two disturbances on the radar,” the Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Wednesday. “This indicates the soil is different in composition in these locations. Around it they detected barbed wire and they found ammunition and a mortar.” The search was part of an exercise but focused on the story...

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Costa Concordia Disaster: 5 More Bodies Found In Cruise Wreckage

GIGLIO, Italy -- Search crews in Italy have found five more bodies in the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which struck a reef off an Italian island in January. The development on Thursday...

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Memorial wall to be constructed for ‘Sendong’ victims

A MEMORIAL wall is set to be constructed at the Gaston Park to remember those who perished at the height of Tropical Storm Sendong in December 2011. On Friday, groundbreaking of the marker was conducted by JCI Bai Lawanen, the project’s proponent. A MEMORIAL wall is set to be constructed at the Gaston Park to remember those who perished at the height of Tropical Storm Sendong in December 2011. On Friday, groundbreaking of the marker was conducted by JCI Bai Lawanen, the project’s proponent. The marker, which measures eight feet tall and 12 feet wide, will be engraved with the names of those who died in the flash flood based on the list of the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (NDRRMC). Based on the NDRRMC list, at least 674 persons have been reported died during the tragedy. However, of the number, only 459 were in the master list who have already been identified. Once the list is updated, the JCI would also update...

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German cruise ship victim identified

The body of a victim recovered from the semi-submerged cruise liner Costa Concordia a month ago was officially identified Friday as German tourist Margarethe Neth, Italian officials said. Neth's body was found on February 22 along with seven others that were identified a week ago, the prefecture in Grosetto, which has jurisdiction over the island where the ship crashed, said in a statement. Five other bodies were found in the ship's wreckage on Thursday but it will take divers a few days to recover them before they can be identified. The Costa Concordia was carrying 4,229 passengers and crew when it struck rocks off Giglio island in Tuscany and keeled over on the night of January 13, killing 32 people. So far 30 bodies have been found but two are still missing. Meanwhile, salvage workers who began pumping 2,400 tonnes of fuel oil from the ship's tanks on February 12 have finally finished the operation, the Costa Crociere company said...

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Mass funeral for Middle Eastern victims of motorboat sinking

53 dead immigrants from the Middle East were victims of the Barokah motorboat that sank in the Prigi sea, Trenggalek, East Java, and will be buried in general cemetery sites in Putat Jaya. 53 dead immigrants...

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Mass funeral for Middle Eastern victims of motorboat sinking

53 dead immigrants from the Middle East were victims of the Barokah motorboat that sank in the Prigi sea, Trenggalek, East Java, and will be buried in general cemetery sites in Putat Jaya. 53 dead immigrants...

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Costa Concordia: Five more bodies found

More than two months after the cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized off the Italian coast, a team searching the wreck has found five more bodies. Italian authorities say they were found outside the ship, in a small space between the wreck and the sea bed. Altogether 30 bodies have now been found since the vessel ran aground off the island of Giglio on 13 January. The Costa Concordia was carrying 4,200 passengers and crew when its hull was torn open by rocks. Civil Protection Agency chief Franco Gabrielli did not give any details on the sex or ages of the latest victims to be found. Two people remain missing and are presumed dead. Eight more bodies were found in late February, but forensic authorities are still working on formally identifying them. A crew member from India and passengers from the US, Italy and Germany are reported to be among those as yet unaccounted for. 22 March 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-1747...

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Argentine veterans insist with identifying remains of 123 comrades buried in Falklands

Argentine veterans from the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war with Britain reiterated on Wednesday a request for the identification of 123 unknown comrades buried in the Falkland Islands. The request was presented by the Malvinas War Veterans branch from La Plata, to Julio Alak, Justice and Human Rights minister. It follows the presentation last August of an appeal before a federal court with the purpose of identifying the remains in the NN graves. “In the Malvinas Darwin cemetery there are 234 graves of which 123 have no names and only have a plaque which reads ‘Argentine soldier, only known to God’” said Ernesto Alonso a member of the board from the Veterans organization. Alonso recalled that at the end of the conflict in June 1982 “many bodies remained in the battle fields and the identification was left in the hands of the British, but in 123 cases they couldn’t do it because they did not have the ID ‘dog tags’ with names or any other...

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French, Israeli, ZAKA Volunteers Secured Full Jewish Burial in Israel for Toulouse Victims

The bodies of the four victims of yesterday’s shooting attack at the Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse will be flown back to Israel for burial later Tuesday night, arriving in Israel at 4 a.m. local time. The funeral is scheduled to take place at 10 a.m. in Jerusalem. The ZAKA International Rescue Unit handled all aspects of returning the four bodies to Israel. A special delegation from Israel, led by ZAKA International Rescue Unit commander Mati Goldstein, joined the volunteers from the ZAKA France. The teams worked at the school, clearing the scene and assisting in the forensic identification of the victims. One of the ZAKA volunteers reported that, after a short memorial ceremony in the courtyard of the Otzar Hatorah school, the bodies were transferred in an army plane to Paris. The bodies will be flown out on the midnight El Al flight from Paris to Tel Aviv. The ZAKA volunteers from France, working together with the delegation from...

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Senegal boat disaster victims want Paris probe to go ahead

Senegal boat disaster victims want Paris probe to go ahead INTERNATIONAL NEWS - Relatives of over 1,800 people killed in Africa's worst maritime disaster say the case must not be buried as Dakar attempted Monday to have a French inquiry into the accident annulled. In Ziguinchor in the southern Casamance region of Senegal, the air was heavy around a few white tombstones where victims of the 2002 Joola ferry disaster are buried at the overgrown Kantene cemetery "The Joola case will not go unpunished despite Senegal's acrobatics to have it buried," said Eli Jean-Bernard Diatta, standing among the graves. She lost her elder brother who had been chaperoning 26 children on a football trip when the boat capsized in stormy seas off Gambia while sailing between Casamance and the capital Dakar. None of the children survived. Kantene is one of four cemeteries where about 500 recovered bodies were buried in mass graves, most unidentified. The severely...

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Senegal boat disaster victims want Paris probe to go ahead

Senegal boat disaster victims want Paris probe to go ahead INTERNATIONAL NEWS - Relatives of over 1,800 people killed in Africa's worst maritime disaster say the case must not be buried as Dakar attempted Monday to have a French inquiry into the accident annulled. In Ziguinchor in the southern Casamance region of Senegal, the air was heavy around a few white tombstones where victims of the 2002 Joola ferry disaster are buried at the overgrown Kantene cemetery "The Joola case will not go unpunished despite Senegal's acrobatics to have it buried," said Eli Jean-Bernard Diatta, standing among the graves. She lost her elder brother who had been chaperoning 26 children on a football trip when the boat capsized in stormy seas off Gambia while sailing between Casamance and the capital Dakar. None of the children survived. Kantene is one of four cemeteries where about 500 recovered bodies were buried in mass graves, most unidentified. The severely...

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Six killed as Taiwanese gravel ship sinks

A Taiwanese gravel ship has sunk off the northern coast of the island, leaving six crew members dead and two missing. Seven crew members have been rescued. Taiwan's coastguard said the bodies of four Indonesian and two Taiwanese crewmen from the Ocean Glory were recovered after the ship sank shortly after leaving the port of Keelung. Local media outlets say heavy fog or rough seas may have caused the accident. The coastguard said searchers rescued seven people and were still looking for the two missing crew members. 19 March 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/six-killed-as-taiwanese-gravel-ship-sinks-7576985.h...

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Bones in Mass Grave 100 Years old?

Specialist Biçer doubts the statement that the human bones found in a mass grave in Diyarbakır were a hundred years old. He said that the report of the Forensic Medicine Institute was insufficient and announced to apply for an independent investigation. The Forensic Medicine Institute recently announced that the 34 skulls found in a mass grave in Diyarbakır were at least a hundred years old. The excavation was carried out right next to a building that had been used as headquarters of the clandestine gendarmerie's intelligence and counterterrorism unit JİTEM in the 1990s. Excavations in the quarter of Saraykapı had started on 11 January in the neighbourhood of the Diyarbakır Closed Prison and the Courthouse. The Forensic Medicine Institute announced in a statement, "The determined morphological changes suggest that the bones were lying in the earth for at least one hundred years. One part of the bones belongs to animals. Regarding the...

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KATH to undertake mass burial of unclaimed bodies

Kumasi, March 12, GNA – The authorities of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) had announced the decision to undertake a mass burial of all unclaimed bodies at the hospital's mortuary. This has been fixed for Monday, March 26, and it is meant to decongest the mortuary to improve the quality of pathological services. A statement signed by Mr Kwame Frimpong, the Public Relations Officer, in Kumasi, said the affected bodies, some of which had been in the morgue for over six years were brought in by the police and other members of the public. The identities of majority of these dead persons are unknown and were victims of road traffic accidents. The rest include those suddenly taken ill or collapsed in public places and brought to the facility by “Good Samaritans.” The statement said the hospital's morgue was now choked and that the authorities were left with no choice but to bury them in mass grave. It appealed to people who have...

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Swedish rescuers find wreckage of crashed plane

Rescuers have found the wreckage of a Norwegian military plane that crashed with five people on board during an exercise in northern Sweden, officials said today. Parts of the C-130 cargo aircraft were found scattered over a glacier on mount Kebnekaise, Sweden's highest mountain, rescue spokesman Mathias Hansson said. Four men and one woman — all Norwegians — were on board the plane heading from Evenes, on Norway's Arctic coast, to the Swedish city of Kiruna when it disappeared from radar screens just before 3pm Thursday over the mountain range. Hansson said the crew had not been found, but "there is nothing that indicates" they had survived the crash. "There are a lot of wreckage parts spread out over a large area. It suggests it was a major impact," Hansson said. The plane was participating in a Norwegian-led military exercise with 16,000 soldiers from 14 countries taking part. Rescue helicopters and military aircraft taking...

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Families taken to identify Swiss bus crash victims

Grief-stricken relatives of those killed in a horrific bus crash inside a Swiss tunnel earlier this week were taken to identify the bodies Thursday, police say. Relatives were driven from a hotel in the Swiss town of Sion to a nearby morgue where the bodies of 22 school children and six adults killed in Tuesday's crash were being held ahead of repatriation. "Where possible the bodies will be shown to the families," police spokesman Jean-Marie Bornet said. "In some cases this is not possible because the bodies are too badly injured." "The families are there to identify the bodies and to give information to help in the formal identification of those who cannot be identified" visually, a police spokesman told AFP. Some of the bodies are to be repatriated to Belgium Thursday, he confirmed. The bus from Belgium was carrying 52 people when it hit a wall inside the Tunnel de Geronde about an hour after heading home from a skiing trip in the...

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12 dead in Afghanistan helicopter crash

Twelve people died today when a Turkish helicopter crashed into a house near the Afghan capital Kabul. Ten of the victims were on board the aircraft and two were on the ground. Authorities were trying to determine the nationalities of the people who were in the helicopter when it crashed. Some of the bodies were almost completely burned. The house hit by the helicopter collapsed. Rescue workers were searching through the rubble to determine whether there were any more casualties. Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu confirmed that a Turkish helicopter crashed near Kabul, but he did not have information about casualties. Mr Davutoglu said the Turkish commander of the Kabul regional command has left for the area. The aircraft went down in the Hassian Khail area of the Bagrami district of Kabul province. It was unclear what caused the helicopter to crash. Friday 16 March 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/12-de...

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Guatemalan ex-soldier jailed for 6,060 years over Dos Erres massacre

Pedro Pimentel Rios is fifth member of elite military force to be imprisoned for role in killings of 201 people in 1982 A former Guatemalan special forces soldier has been sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the killings of 201 people in a 1982 massacre. Pedro Pimentel Rios was the fifth member of the elite military force to be sentenced to 6,060 years or more for what became known as the Dos Erres massacre after the killings in the northern Guatemala village during the 1960-96 civil war. The sentence handed down by a three-judge panel is largely symbolic since under Guatemalan law the maximum time a prisoner can serve is 50 years. It specified 30 years for each of the 201 deaths, plus 30 years for crimes against humanity. Pimentel Rios, 54, is a former instructor at a training school for the military force known as the Kaibiles. He lived in Santa Ana, California, and worked in a clothing factory for years until being...

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Mexico: Argentine Forensics Speak Out on Disappeared Women

The Argentine Forensic Anthropologist Team (EAAF), a civil organisation that has assisted with victim identification for massacres in several countries, has spoken out about its work on disappeared women in Ciudad Juarez. The EAAF, originally hired to conduct research in 2005, has been working to match the remains of missing women with collected DNA samples from more than 195 people who have reported the disappearance of relatives as far back as 1993. In response to the recent discovery of 50 unidentified remains that have been stored at a local morgue for more than a year, the EAAF has addressed the political failures to stem the chronic problem of disappearing women in Ciudad Juarez. In a report published in 2010, a special prosecutor in Ciudad Juarez listed 379 women murdered and 4,456 missing between 1993 and 2005. Figures from NGOs in the area, as well as from the EAAF, suggest that these numbers are in fact higher. “It was not...

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Guatemala: Mass Graves Excavated at Former Military Outpost

Guatemalan anthropologists are excavating mass graves at a former military outpost near Cobán, Alta Verapaz, searching for the remains of 200-300 people. The bodies are suspected to belong to people who were disappeared during the country’s internal armed conflict, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. The former outpost – Now a UN peacekeeper training centre – has five mass graves nearby, said the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala’s deputy director José Suasnavar. “In the fifth pit, which we are working on now, we have already found 14 skulls,” he said at a press conference earlier this week. A search warrant drawn by the First Court of High Risk allowed Attorneys of the Public Ministry (MP) and researchers at the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala to go to the site, and they have been working there since the 27th February. “It is very uncertain, determining the number of bodies that can be located in the former military...

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Colombia: Nine Bodies Recovered From Mine

Emergency services have recovered nine bodies from a coal mine in the Antioquía province in the northeast of Colombia. The miners had been trapped underground since Wednesday, when a local water deposit burst and flooded the mine. While there was hope some miners would survive, it was extinguished today when the last body was brought to surface at about 5am local time. “The rescue team recovered all nine dead bodies of the miners trapped in the coal mine El Desespero,” the government body for risk management reported. The cause of the accident at the El Desespero (Despair) mine is still unknown. The tragic event has sparked a dispute between local and national governments over the legality of the mine and whether it should have been operating at all. “This mine had been closed last June because it didn’t comply with the [safety] standards,” said Mauricio Cárdenas, the minister for energy and mining. “It was clearly an illegal activity.” Cárdenas...

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Mass funeral for victims of Congo blasts

BRAZZAVILLE – Thousands of people attended a memorial service on Sunday for the victims of last weekend’s munitions dump blasts in the Congo capital, as authorities announced a new death toll of 223. Medard Milandu, who conducted the service, said 159 of the bodies had so far been identified. An earlier toll said nearly 200 people were killed and more than 2 300 injured in the explosions, which destroyed hundreds of houses, leaving 14 000 people homeless. Relatives of the victims took their places in six white tents opposite a pavilion for officials erected on the esplanade outside the Congress Centre in the capital. The coffins of 145 victims arrived 10 at a time on lorry trailers shortly after 11h00. The coffins were draped in Congo’s green, yellow and red flag and adorned with wreaths. Family members, many in tears, clutched photos of their dead relatives and crosses bearing their date of birth and death on Sunday March 4. On the...

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Bangladesh ferry sinks with 200 people on board

A ferry packed with about 200 people has capsized in a river in southern Bangladesh, drowning 18 people and leaving dozens more missing, according to the authorities. Death toll expected to rise from...

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