Srinagar, Apr 1: Police has submitted a fresh list of unmarked graves found across the Kashmir valley to State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) and exercise of counting of such graves had been carried out under an “Internal Administrative Order (IAO).”
Under the preview of the order, all the district Senior Superintendent of Police (SSPs) were directed by their higher ups to find out the details ad number of the unmarked graves in their respective districts.
The order was passed soon after expose by the investigating wing of SHRC that there are 2156 unidentified bodies buried at 38 sites in Jammu and Kashmir. The expose created uproar in political, human rights and civil society circles.
Director General of Police (DGP) Kuldeep Khoda told Greater Kashmir that a fresh list of unmarked graves has been submitted to SHRC. “Counting of such graves was carried out throughout the Valley. We have submitted the fresh list to SHRC,” DGP said. However he did not divulge the exact number graves found across the Kashmir valley.
In Baramulla district of north Kashmir, 421 such graves have been found. A senior police official from Baramulla told Greater Kashmir on the basis of anonymity that they carried out the documentation of mass graves in border town of Uri, Bijhama, Sheeri, Pattan, Gulmarg and Boniyar areas of the district.
“Our investigating teams found a total number of 421 unidentified persons buried in these unmarked graves,” the police officer said adding that the teams also found the graves 523 identified militants in these areas.
If reports are to be believed, the cops have been seen visiting graveyards in the rural areas before the last snowfall and they were trying to ascertain the facts about marked and unmarked graves.
The exercise according police sources was carried out jointly by the cops of respective police stations in their areas and CID people. The exercise has also been carried out in frontier district of Kupwara and Bandipora.
In Kupwara district, there are reportedly many such graveyards where identified and unidentified militants are buried. One in Lolab area of Kalaroos and other in Kralopra are said to be biggest ones. On number third is a graveyard in Handwara town.
According to sources, in Kalaroos most militants killed in encounters at LoC in Machil sector were being buried. While as at Kralpora graveyard those killed in Keran and Chowkibal sectors of LoC were buried. All these areas are claimed to be strategic from infiltration point of view.
Sunday, 1 April 2012
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2012/Apr/2/police-submit-fresh-list-to-shrc-22.asp
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Vietnam finds mass grave of communist soldiers
HANOI, Vietnam — A mass grave has been found containing the remains of 23 communist soldiers believed to have been killed during the Tet Offensive, seen by many as the turning point of the Vietnam War.
Col. Nguyen Minh Hung of provincial military command in central Khanh Hoa province said Tuesday that construction workers who were expanding a highway found the site last week. He says it took 30 soldiers and militiamen six days to recover the remains, none of which were identified.
The soldiers were believed to have been killed while withdrawing after attacking an airport and the local military headquarters of the Saigon government, he said.
Thousands of Viet Cong guerrillas attacked major towns across southern Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in January 1968.
Monday, 2 April 2012
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/02/vietnam-finds-mass-grave-of-communist-soldiers/?ap
Col. Nguyen Minh Hung of provincial military command in central Khanh Hoa province said Tuesday that construction workers who were expanding a highway found the site last week. He says it took 30 soldiers and militiamen six days to recover the remains, none of which were identified.
The soldiers were believed to have been killed while withdrawing after attacking an airport and the local military headquarters of the Saigon government, he said.
Thousands of Viet Cong guerrillas attacked major towns across southern Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in January 1968.
Monday, 2 April 2012
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/02/vietnam-finds-mass-grave-of-communist-soldiers/?ap
Moscow market fire kills 15 migrant workers
MOSCOW: Fifteen people died Tuesday when a night time fire tore through a two-story Moscow market warehouse in which migrant workers from a former Soviet republic were camping out.
"We have found another body and now there are 15," a Moscow emergencies ministry spokesman told AFP.
'They were migrant workers. We are trying to confirm which (ex-Soviet) republic they came from."
Unconfirmed news reports said the migrants were from the impoverished Central Asian nation of Tajikistan. Numerous Moscow markets employ cheap laborers from the region without giving them proper housing or pay.
The blaze broke out early Tuesday at the market on the southern outskirts of the city called Kachalovsky. Officials said it took two hours to put out.
Emergency workers described squalid living conditions in which the workers slept on hard cots that were stacked on top of each other in rows of four without any direct access to the outside.
The workers "lived in a metal annex that was equipped with a space heater", an unnamed law enforcement official told the Interfax news agency.
"They slept in frighteningly tight conditions, on hard bunk cots that were then stacked on top of each other," he said.
Another official said the workers probably left the space heater on all night to stay warm during the frigid Moscow spring. Overnight temperatures plunged below freezing and much of central Russia has been hit by snow.
Russia's Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu demanded an immediate account of how the workers ended up living in a space the market had reserved for storing hardware supplies.
"This is turning into a tradition -- people living in markets," Shoigu said in televised remarks.
"Someone must have settled them there. This facility was completely unsuitable for housing. I ask the law enforcement official to look into this."
The migration service estimates that there are 700,000 Tajiks living officially in the country -- a tenth of their home country's population of just under seven million.
Tajikistan was wracked by a brutal civil war in the early 1990s and then experienced nearly two decades of ethnic tensions and endemic drugs trafficking that hampered sustainable growth.
Its economy remains in tatters and some analysts estimate that up to half of Tajikistan's young male population is currently trying to make a living in Moscow and other major Russian cities.
The overwhelming majority of the migrants who arrive in Moscow do so without acquiring the official city worker permits that the Russian capital has required since Soviet times.
Their employment is therefore never officially reported to the authorities and many end up living in Moscow apartment block basements or makeshift residences.
Seven migrants were killed in January 2009 when a fire swept through an underground Moscow garage they were building and had also used as a temporary living shelter.
Another seven died in May 2011 when a fire engulfed an old abandoned building in central Moscow.
The presence of Central Asian nationals and workers from the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region has also stirred racial tensions in the Russian capital and resulted in repeated deadly attacks.
President-elect Vladimir Putin had vowed to reinforce migration controls while serving as prime minister for the past four years and won a strong following from Russian nationalists while heading the Kremlin in 2000-2008.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/International/2012/Apr-03/169033-moscow-market-fire-kills-15-migrant-workers.ashx#ixzz1qxoX2uzq
Tues, 3 April 2012
"We have found another body and now there are 15," a Moscow emergencies ministry spokesman told AFP.
'They were migrant workers. We are trying to confirm which (ex-Soviet) republic they came from."
Unconfirmed news reports said the migrants were from the impoverished Central Asian nation of Tajikistan. Numerous Moscow markets employ cheap laborers from the region without giving them proper housing or pay.
The blaze broke out early Tuesday at the market on the southern outskirts of the city called Kachalovsky. Officials said it took two hours to put out.
Emergency workers described squalid living conditions in which the workers slept on hard cots that were stacked on top of each other in rows of four without any direct access to the outside.
The workers "lived in a metal annex that was equipped with a space heater", an unnamed law enforcement official told the Interfax news agency.
"They slept in frighteningly tight conditions, on hard bunk cots that were then stacked on top of each other," he said.
Another official said the workers probably left the space heater on all night to stay warm during the frigid Moscow spring. Overnight temperatures plunged below freezing and much of central Russia has been hit by snow.
Russia's Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu demanded an immediate account of how the workers ended up living in a space the market had reserved for storing hardware supplies.
"This is turning into a tradition -- people living in markets," Shoigu said in televised remarks.
"Someone must have settled them there. This facility was completely unsuitable for housing. I ask the law enforcement official to look into this."
The migration service estimates that there are 700,000 Tajiks living officially in the country -- a tenth of their home country's population of just under seven million.
Tajikistan was wracked by a brutal civil war in the early 1990s and then experienced nearly two decades of ethnic tensions and endemic drugs trafficking that hampered sustainable growth.
Its economy remains in tatters and some analysts estimate that up to half of Tajikistan's young male population is currently trying to make a living in Moscow and other major Russian cities.
The overwhelming majority of the migrants who arrive in Moscow do so without acquiring the official city worker permits that the Russian capital has required since Soviet times.
Their employment is therefore never officially reported to the authorities and many end up living in Moscow apartment block basements or makeshift residences.
Seven migrants were killed in January 2009 when a fire swept through an underground Moscow garage they were building and had also used as a temporary living shelter.
Another seven died in May 2011 when a fire engulfed an old abandoned building in central Moscow.
The presence of Central Asian nationals and workers from the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region has also stirred racial tensions in the Russian capital and resulted in repeated deadly attacks.
President-elect Vladimir Putin had vowed to reinforce migration controls while serving as prime minister for the past four years and won a strong following from Russian nationalists while heading the Kremlin in 2000-2008.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/International/2012/Apr-03/169033-moscow-market-fire-kills-15-migrant-workers.ashx#ixzz1qxoX2uzq
Tues, 3 April 2012
Titanic archive - identification and disposition of victims
http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/titanic/list.asp?Search=
Tragic story of the Titanic one of many to touch Atlantic Canadians
HALIFAX - His was the fourth body pulled from the icy North Atlantic days after the Titanic sank in 1912.
Sidney Leslie Goodwin was only 19 months old when he died. The little English boy is buried in the north end of Halifax.
Though he wasn't the youngest Titanic passenger to perish, his story serves as a poignant reminder that in the weeks after the sinking, crews from four ships — most of them sailors from Halifax — volunteered to perform the grim task of recovering bodies left bobbing on the cold ocean.
History shows that the residents of Atlantic Canada have so often risen to the occasion at times of tragedy that their willingness to help others has become a threadbare cliche.
But like all cliches, this one contains a hard kernel of truth.
For more than a century before the Titanic disaster, the region suffered through countless shipwrecks, major fires, coal mining tragedies and all manner of natural disasters.
In early October 1853, for example, a fierce storm off the north coast of P.E.I. was blamed for sinking about 100 fishing schooners, claiming up to 400 lives. To this day, the Yankee Gale is considered the worst disaster in the Island's history.
On April 1, 1873 — almost 40 years before the Titanic foundered on its maiden voyage — another state-of-the-art White Star Line passenger ship, the SS Atlantic, went aground and sank just west of Halifax, taking more than 500 souls with her. It was one of the worst civilian maritime disasters of the 19th century. Close to 300 of the victims are buried in mass graves near Lower Prospect. N.S.
By the time the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, residents of the Maritimes and Newfoundland were well acquainted with large-scale disasters, which helps explain why the people of Halifax worked tirelessly to recover the dead and comfort surviving relatives.
"The citizens of Halifax were so moved by it, and they came out in large numbers," says Paul Butler of St. John's, N.L., author of "Titanic's Ashes," a recently published fictional account of the aftermath of the ship's demise. "Being at the mercy of the ocean ... is central to people who have a maritime connection."
Published accounts from the time say the recovery of Titanic victims was physically and emotionally draining, particularly for those who found Goodwin, a fair-haired child whose entire family perished in the sinking.
"He came floating toward us with a little upturned face," John Snow Jr., an embalmer aboard the Mackay-Bennett, told the Halifax Herald after the telegraph-cable ship returned to port, having recovered 306 bodies — 116 of which were buried at sea because they were badly disfigured.
A total of 150 Titanic victims are buried in three Halifax graveyards, their bodies prepared by 40 embalmers from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
It's hard to conceive that anything good could come from taking part in such gruesome tasks, but Bob Conrad thinks otherwise.
In September 1998, Conrad was among a group of Nova Scotia fishermen who joined the search for survivors after a Swissair passenger jet caught fire and crashed into St. Margarets Bay, west of Halifax.
None of the 229 people aboard survived, but Conrad didn't know that as he used a powerful light on his boat to scan a horrific debris field reeking of jet fuel and littered with ghastly array of shredded luggage, clothing and body parts.
At one point, he thought he spotted a child's doll. But as he drew closer, he realized the small figure was that of a toddler's naked body. Conrad recalls how he gently lifted the boy from the water and wrapped him in a blanket.
The fisherman would later learn the boy's name was Robert Martin Maillet. He was only 14 months old when he died along with his parents, Karen Domingue Maillet and Denis Maillet, both 37, of Baton Rouge, La. He was the youngest person on the plane.
Today, Conrad speaks in calm, even tones when describing what happened that moonless night.
"There's a tendency to think that it would be awful — and it is," says Conrad, now 65.
"But, from my experience, when the need to help another is critical, the element of danger and personal threat seems to be gone; it's not there. What would be horrid for your eyes to see, somehow is muted or blunted so that you can perform the task at hand. That was most amazing to me."
Conrad says he didn't think twice about heading out on the water that night. He says he's convinced that his deep desire to help those in need is shared by most people who live in small communities along Atlantic Canada's rugged coastline.
"Why we respond in such a giving, caring kind of way seems to be very deeply connected to the sense of community that we have achieved, unconsciously or otherwise, over the course of our lives" he says.
"Generally, we like where we live. We develop a very deep sense of place in that experience. ... Every society values this sense of community if they can discover it. Sometimes, big cities lose it. Individuals become invisible."
Butler says the reality of living on the East Coast has long meant struggling to survive and relying on others to get by.
"There's almost like an egalitarian ethos in this province (Newfoundland and Labrador) and probably in Nova Scotia. It's based upon this idea that you'll survive if you share and you work out how to survive as a community. The ethos is still there in the background, in terms of sharing and community values."
Blair Beed, a Halifax author and well-known Titanic sites tour guide, says Atlantic Canadians are not unique in their ability to reach out to others.
"When we had the Halifax Explosion in 1917, the people of Boston came rallying to us because of that friendship across the border," says Beed, author of "Titanic Victims in Halifax Graveyards."
"But we certainly have a long history of helping others," he says, noting that Halifax — founded in 1749 as a military base — has always been imbued by a sense of duty and loyalty.
As well, the geography of the Atlantic region has played an obvious role in shaping the Atlantic character, he says. Jutting into the North Atlantic, the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland are routinely in harm's way when the weather turns foul.
"In the early days, people were crashing into us just because they didn't have the technology to say we were there," says Beed, whose grandfather was an undertaker's assistant who helped process bodies recovered after Titanic's sinking.
"I grew up with the idea that my grandfather was one of those people who said, 'The job has to be done.' "
For fisherman Bob Conrad, who still lives in Fox Point, N.S., the motivation to help others comes from a profound place.
"For me, there is this reality for every human being: each of us wants our life to count for something. ... It's just that when you get in a disaster scenario, the opportunity to achieve that is thrust upon you," he says.
"There's something so meaningful in not living for yourself but living for others and in community.
Monday, 2 April 2012
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/titanic-swissair-atlantic-canada-answers-call-disaster-strikes-083007307.html