Last president of exiled Polish government to be exhumed

Ryszard Kaczorowski, a victim of the 2010 Smolensk air disaster and last president of the Polish-government-in-exile is to be exhumed on Monday as his remains may have been confused with those of another victim.

Kaczorowski's remains will be exhumed together with those of a second male victim, whose identity has not been disclosed.

The exhumations follow the confirmation last month that two other crash victims, including the late Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz, were buried in the wrong graves.

Last week Dr Viktor Kolkutin, the Russian doctor in charge of the identifications of victims, claimed that his team's work could not be held responsible.

“I can only say that absolutely everyone received what they identified,” Dr Viktor Kolkutin told the Polish edition of Newsweek.

“What happened after the coffins departed from Moscow to Poland we do not know,” he said.

“We did not lead the coffins to the graves where they were laid to rest,” he said.

Kolkutin noted that relatives of the victims were “in shock” during the identification process, and that almost a third of the 96 victims were not easily recognisable.

Ryszard Kaczorowski was born in 1919 in the city of Bialystok, north east Poland, an area that was occupied by the the Soviets in 1939 during the first phase of World War II.

He was arrested in 1940 as a leader of the so-called Szare Szeregi (The Grey Ranks) a scouting group that worked in tandem with the Polish resistance.

Kaczorowski was deported to Siberia but later freed by an amnesty the following year, alongside thousands of other internees.

He joined the army that was being formed in Russia by General Wladyslaw Anders, who had himself been freed from internment by the Soviets.

The so-called Polish Second Corps journeyed to Iran, where it regrouped and joined the fight against the Nazis as part of the British 8th Army.

Kaczorowski fought in several battles in Italy, including Monte Cassino.

After the war he did not return to Poland, as did the majority of Anders' veterans, owing to the installation of a communist regime in his homeland.

He settled in UK, where the Polish government-in-exile was based.

He was elected president in 1989, having previously served as a minister.

Nevertheless, owing to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, his term was short-lived, and he returned the presidential insignia to Poland in December 1990 in a ceremony at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

He was a regular visitor to Poland, as an honoured guest of the republic, taking part in countless events.

Following the Smolensk air disaster, he was laid to rest in Warsaw's national pantheon, the Temple of Divine Providence.

Five victims of the crash have been exhumed thus far and wo turned out to have been buried in the wrong grave

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://redaktorext.polskieradio.pl/1/9/Artykul/115896,Last-president-of-exiled-Polish-government-to-be-exhumed

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Major General Al Raisi inaugurates the second Victims Identification Course in collaboration with the INTERPOL

The International Criminal Police Organization “INTERPOL” announced that the United Arab Emirates is the first country in the Middle East to acquire membership of the International Criminal Police Organization (widely known as INTERPOL) on Disaster Victim Identification.

The announcement was made during the opening of the second course on Disaster Victim Identification, held at the Eastern Mangroves Hotel, under the supervision of the Victims Affairs Office at the Ministry of the Interior, in the collaboration and coordination with the International Criminal Police Organization. The opening session was attended by Central Operations Directors and a number of concerned police entities and external partners from different institutions in the state.

During the opening of the International course, Major General Ahmed Nasser Al Raisi, Director General of Abu Dhabi Police Central Operations, said that collaboration in exchanging information and expertise between the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) and the Victims Affairs Office of Abu Dhabi Police Crisis and Disasters Management Department has contributed a quantum leap in developing the work mechanisms and the professional level of the employees.

The course included a number of topics related to Victims Identification, during disasters and crisis. The topics were discussed by experts from the International Criminal Police Organization such as Steve Sergeant, victim identification expert from the Victims Affairs Office of the Crisis and Disaster Management Department, who highlighted the social and legal responsibility to identify the victims of disasters and crisis and how to determine their identities.

The expert Simon Dzedrofski, Director of Victims Identification branch in the INTERPOL in Lyon, France, commended the UAE’s keenness to identify the victims, pointing out that UAE is the first country in the Middle east to acquire membership at the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) specialized in DVI.

Dzedrofski talked about the history of the INTERPOL, established in 1923, and the reasons behind its establishment, its different development stages to finally becoming the biggest international police organization, including 188 countries, pointing out that it was recognized by the United Nations in 1971. Moreover, he added that more countries will be joining the INTERPOL in the upcoming years.

He also mentioned that the official languages used at the organization are: Arabic, English, French and Spanish. Establishing the Victims affairs Office constituted a landmark in the terms of decision-making, and the use of work mechanisms in accordance with international standards, thus proving the commitment ofVictims Affairs Office employees to work as per these standards, which earned the office a an important status in the region.

In the same context, Joan Coetzee, Victim identification expert at the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), talked about the importance of the INTERPOL and its role in identifying victims; stressing that the task of identifying disaster victims is a complex task, and no entity or state can individually identify victims without help, particularly since these “helpers” includes volunteer experts, health services and other organizations.

Joan confirmed that the process of Victims Identification faced several challenges which may affect the search and selection processes. One the challenge is the public opinion which asks for a speedy completion of the work without taking into consideration the difficulties involved. As challenges, we can also mention the media that plays a significant role in guiding the public opinion; as well as the political positions of some countries represented by the direct intervention in the organization’s work during the victim’s identification process, or through practicing political pressure in order to accelerate the completion of the mission.

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://www.adpolice.gov.ae/en/News/uae.first.identify.victims.aspx

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The truth lies six feet under

NOT TOO long ago, Kashmiris saw a ray of hope when Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced that he would revoke the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act. However, he failed to walk the talk. The interlocutors’ report met the same fate. Now, the issue of thousands of unmarked graves dotting the meadows and mountains of the state has reached a similar conclusion.

When the mass graves were discovered in 2005, Omar had agreed to use DNA tests to identify the corpses. But in a report published on 13 August, the Home Department (of which Omar is in charge) has not only declined DNA testing, but also labelled those buried as “combatants” amid pleas from hundreds of families that their relatives may have been buried in unmarked graves after fake encounters.

The government’s action-taken report (ATR) was filed in reply to the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), following the latter’s April 2012 finding of 2,156 unidentified bodies at 38 burial sites in north Kashmir, of which 574 were identified as those of local residents. The SHRC had demanded DNA testing of the corpses. However, the government said DNA testing would be done only when the complainant could locate the graveyard and the grave in which their relatives might be buried with a “fair amount of certainty” — a rider ridiculed by human rights activists and the families of the missing.

It’s pertinent to note that the government’s ATR is entirely based on police FIRs, thus making it a contentious report.

“The government’s report is aimed at burying the past,” says Razia Sultana, 36, whose 22-year-old quest to find her missing father ultimately led human rights groups to the unmarked graves. She started searching for Raja Ali Mardan Khan (then 55) of Bela Boniyar village, located 90 km from Srinagar, after he didn’t return home on 13 May 1990. The last time he was seen was at a provision store with a bag of sugar and a pack of cigarettes in his hand.

“I lodged a missing persons report but the police’s reaction was that he might have crossed the LOC (Line of Control). I was shocked. He didn’t need to because he had a government job. Anyway, he was too old to go for gun training,” she says.

Sultana’s mother and sister made a trip to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK), but they failed to locate Khan. Since then, she has visited many graveyards, police stations, torture cells and militant hideouts.

It was during the October 2005 earthquake when a team of human rights activists led by the J&K Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) reached Bela Boniyar with relief that Sultana disclosed the presence of mass graves.

Four years later, in November 2009, the JKCCS and the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir came out with their preliminary report called ‘Buried Evidence’, which revealed the presence of 2,700 unmarked graves spread across 55 villages of Kupwara, Baramulla and Bandipora districts.

TEHELKA TREKKED to Bimyar, perched on a mountain overlooking paddy fields and the gushing Jhelum beneath the foothills, located 20 km away from Baramulla town.

In 2003, Atta Mohammad, 65, a farmer, was forced by the police and the Indian Army to become a gravedigger on what was until then a wasteland. “I wasn’t a professional. It took me four hours to dig a grave,” he recalls. “But as the body count rose, I was digging graves at a faster rate.”

He remembers burying the first body. “That night, I vomited. I couldn’t sleep at all. The mutilated face kept haunting me,” he says. The experience made Mohammad decide not to dig any more, but the bullet-ridden bodies started to come in threes and fours; one day the toll was nine. Just like cops and soldiers, families too started pouring in, but very few were successful in identifying the graves of their relatives.

Out of 200 graves, only six bodies have been identified. Relatives would confirm from Mohammad about the clothes and appearance of the body he had buried. The next day, they would come with marble tombstones with the names of the victims etched on them. “At least for some, the struggle would end there. But there are many who came and left dejected. They think their kith and kin are buried here. But there’s no way to prove it,” he says.

Mohammad narrates a chilling incident when a body came for burial and he wanted help in shifting the body. He asked Ghulam Mohiuddin Dar, an electricity board employee working in Bimyar, to assist him. Dar refused. “The next day, Dar came with tears in his eyes. He told me the boy that I had buried was his son,” he recalls.

In fact, when Mohammad went to POK to visit his relatives in 2006, nine bodies were brought to Bimyar for burial. One of the buried, he would later learn, was his nephew Mohammad Saleem, who had gone missing. The old man never tried to open any of the graves to locate his body.

There are bones beneath the Kichama earth too, located 8 km from Baramulla town. Of the skeletal remains of 105 people, not a single body has been identified.

“Each body bears bullet marks. Some are surely not from Kashmir, but the others seem to be local youth,” says Ghulam Mohammad Mir, 42, who oversees the graveyard. “The security forces say they were killed in gunbattles. They would dump the bodies and we would oblige them.”

Mir shows a grave that contains three bodies. According to him, the police and the army had brought the partially burnt bodies, who they claimed were militants. The villagers buried them in a single grave after removing their tattered clothes. Even today, the clothes remain tied to the tree trunks waiting for anyone to identify them.

AMONG THOSE who called the government report “an insult to the families of the disappeared” is lawyer Parvez Imroz of the JKCCS. While demanding DNA testing of the unmarked graves, he compares the situation with Pakistan’s violence-hit Balochistan. “We slam Pakistan for its poor human rights record, but even they have allowed a UN team to visit the conflict-ridden state. Pakistan has also appointed a three-member parliamentary committee to look into missing person cases that run into hundreds. But when it comes to Kashmir, where the figures are in the thousands, the government not only refuses to identify the dead, but also asks families of the disappeared to identify the grave.”

Even the SHRC’s Division Bench member Rafiq Fida criticises the official stand: “There are cases when a person from south Kashmir was found to be buried in the north. The government’s decision to do DNA profiling only when someone can tell with a fair amount of clarity where his relative is buried is ridiculous. If people knew where their missing are buried, why would they knock on the government’s doors?”

Then there are several cases that puncture the government’s claims that all those buried were combatants. Kashmir already has fake encounter cases such as Pathribal, Ganderbal and Machil in which the dead were dubbed Pakistani militants and buried in unmarked graves before their exhumation and DNA profiling indicated that they were local youth killed for promotions and rewards.

Reyaz Ahmad Bhat’s death is one such example. On 29 April 2007, the army’s 47 Rashtriya Rifles (RR) and the police’s Special Operations Group claimed to have killed four Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba militants, who were then buried at Sedarpora in Kupwara. Later, three of the bodies were identified as those of locals killed in fake encounters: Bhat, Manzoor Wagay and Sartaj Ganai. The identity of the fourth body was never ascertained. The bodies of Wagay and Ganai were exhumed and buried in Shopian and Pulwama, respectively.

At Kailashpora in Srinagar, where Bhat lived before disappearing on 4 April 2007, Safina and Javaid Ahmad Bhat are seeking DNA testing of the other two graves to ascertain which of the two graves contains their brother’s body. “We learnt about the death eight months after his disappearance when an anonymous caller said that our brother has been killed. The police showed us a picture of our dead brother, a copy of the FIR declaring him a Pakistani terrorist and the graveyard he was buried in. But we are still not sure in which grave,” says Safina.

In fact, there are cases in which the lack of DNA testing has seen several families claiming one body. For example, when the army’s 18 RR claimed to have gunned down two militants during an encounter in Kupwara on 24 April 2004, Noor Mohammad Shah and Syed Mustafa of Waliwar village in Ganderbal district claimed the bodies and approached the Kupwara District Magistrate for exhuming the bodies. Permission was granted and the bodies were buried again in Ganderbal.

The case took a U-turn on 2 October 2005 when Madan Lal of Nangocheck lodged a written report in Lalpora Police Station saying that Major Vijay Char of 18 RR had taken his son Bhushan Lal on 13 April 2004 along with three other Jammu-based labourers to Kupwara. Madan Lal alleged that the youth were killed in a fake encounter and demanded DNA tests.

‘If people knew where the missing are buried, why would they knock on the government’s doors?’ asks Rafiq Fida

A three-member forensic team from New Delhi was invited to take the samples. However, villagers of Waliwar refused to allow the process, saying reopening the graves would amount to “insulting their religion and the dead people”.

There was another twist in 2005 when an anonymous letter informed Madan Lal that his son was killed in a fake encounter. The letter named a Colonel and a Major as being responsible. When Madan Lal tried to find out more, he reportedly came across Captain Sumit Kohli, who told him that “the person who wrote the letter to you will make sure you get justice”.

A few months later, Captain Kohli was found dead. The army said that Kohli had committed suicide, but his family said the Shaurya Chakra winner was murdered “because he was going to blow the lid off some fake encounters”. The case is being heard in the Punjab and Haryana High Court while human rights activists continue to demand DNA tests to establish who is buried in the graves, which could help solve Captain Kohli’s mysterious death.

BUT THE state prefers to stay silent on the issue. Although Principal Secretary (Home) Braj Raj Sharma agreed at first to be interviewed, he backed off, citing a busy schedule. The chief minister didn’t respond to TEHELKA’s request for comments, despite his personal secretary Asghar Ali agreeing to fix a brief interview. No other senior civilian official would agree to discuss the government’s policy on the issue.

But reliable sources within the police’s human rights cell confirm the presence of unmarked graves in all the districts of Kashmir. TEHELKA has also learnt that officials have found 6,000 persons to have gone missing in the past two decades, a figure all the governments have denied in the past, while human rights groups have maintained that more than 8,000 people have disappeared while in custody.

Although the ATR says no person has come forward despite Omar’s announcement last year that families can lodge complaints for DNA profiling with the police’s CID department, police sources confirm that no such circular was published in any of the leading Kashmiri newspapers. Families who spoke to TEHELKA also pleaded ignorance about the existence of such a cell. The government’s position is that DNA profiling of all the graves will take many years and requires plenty of resources. But world-renowned forensic anthropologist Dr Mark F Skinner of Simon Fraser University, Canada, told TEHELKA in an email interview that DNA testing a body per se is not expensive (“a few hundred dollars, I think”). “The expense arises from the need for excavation, data tracking and contacting relatives for comparative DNA.”

“This is why I suggest taking the help of the International Commission on Missing Persons to deal with such situations,” says Dr Skinner, who was part of the UN team that probed Afghanistan’s mass graves when it was under Taliban rule.

Even as human rights activists have sought the intervention of international agencies in the probe of unmarked graves, those TEHELKA met are left with a strange dilemma. Sultana wants to end her struggle by finding a grave that contains her father, which she says is only possible if all the graves are DNA tested. Safina too says a DNA test is a must to establish which grave contains her brother’s remains. But the emotional Mohammad doesn’t want any grave to be reopened. “How can you hand over to anyone a father a son or a brother represented by a skull, headless torso or a limbless carcass? After burying 200 such bodies, I can guarantee that they won’t withstand the suffering,” he says.

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Ne271012TRUTH.asp

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Central American mothers search for the missing children in Mexico

This woman, identified only as “a Central American woman”, has a name just like her son whose photo she is holding. He disappeared on his journey through Mexico to find work in the US. His mother is traveling in a “Caravana de Madres” with 60 other women whose children have also disappeared on that journey. The women from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, & Guatemala will travel 2,858 miles (4,600 kilometers) from Guatemala across Mexico to the US border on what is called, “the route of the immigrant.” They are mothers looking for their children; their banner is: “I follow your footprints with the hope of finding you.”

Showing photos of their desaparecidos (missing), the Caravana will visit migrant shelters, hospitals, morgues, brothels, & cemeteries, looking for every clue about the fate of their children. Along the way, they will be hosted by Mexican immigration & human rights activists & organizations; they will attend events & rallies organized by students & other activists at universities & venues in 23 towns & cities. The mothers will share their stories to give a human face to immigrants; they will demand investigations & search procedures by the Mexican government & the exhumation of bodies found in mass graves & in cemeteries, where hundreds of immigrants are buried without identification. They will visit San Fernando, a city in Tamaulipas near the US border, where 72 migrants were massacred & near the sites of several other such atrocities. "All Mexico is a graveyard of immigrants," reads a sign displayed by the Caravana. One hopes they can come as far as the US-Mexican border to bear testimony to the thousands of unidentified immigrants who lose their lives in that crossing, to shout their demands to the US government, & to rally the support of human & immigrant rights activists in this country.

An estimated 300,000 Central Americans make that dangerous journey every year & although the Mexican congress has ruled it legal for them to cross Mexico, the Mexican government, in violation of its own laws & in collusion with the US government, makes that journey one of the most dangerous immigration routes in the world. Immigrants are forced to travel on the tops & sides of freight trains while buses heading north are stopped & searched by federal police for immigrants. Along the route, they face every possible kind of violence, including rape, torture, beatings, dismemberment, kidnapping, extortion, murder. Many are murdered, dismembered, & dumped in mass graves or on the highway. The National Human Rights Commission of Mexico registers more than 10,000 migrant kidnappings annually in Mexico. The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement estimates 70,000 Central Americans have disappeared in Mexico in the last six years--a period coinciding with the deployment of 45,000 Mexican soldiers in a so-called drug war against trafficking cartels. The Mexican government attributes this violence to the drug cartels but they need to explain why so many Mexican civilians & immigrants have died while so few drug traffickers have been apprehended--& why drug trafficking has grown exponentially in Mexico in that same period & has in no way been impeded.

In retracing the migrant route north, the Caravana says, “We are on the heels of impunity’s footsteps. While there is one mother searching for a lost child…we will not stop searching & bearing witness no matter how long it takes, no matter how much effort, danger or work it implies.” In their struggle for human rights & justice, they deserve our most active solidarity. (Photo by Oscar Martinez/Reuters)

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://angryarabscommentsection.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/mothers-of-central-america-search-for.html

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Relatives of Antiguan plane crash victim still to receive body

Relatives of the late Sandrama Poligadu, who fell victim to a recent place crash in Antigua, are calling on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to aid in the communication process between them and Antiguan officials.

The accident occurred October 7 in Antigua and “two weeks later we still can’t get the body.”

Speaking to this newspaper Wednesday, son of the deceased, Kisnasammy Poligadu, said that attempts were made to solicit help from the Ministry, but so far no such assistance has been forthcoming.

Further, he stated that a Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffer directed the family to the Ministry of Public Works for assistance.

The distraught eldest offspring of the victim, speaking on behalf of the family, said that they are going through a hard period coping with the death of his mother; but it is even more disturbing that the body has not yet been handed over.

Poligadu said that his brother-in-law Krishan Khan had flown from Montserrat (the woman’s intended destination) to Antigua to identify the body. However, he neither has been able to tie up arrangements to bring her remains back home or ascertain how soon the body would be made available to be transported back to Guyana.

Poligadu noted that from the little information gathered, the process is being held up as Antigua awaits a foreign pathologist to carry out a post mortem examination. A friend of the family indicated that “I am the one who advised them to contact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as I thought the entity would have been most fitting to assist in this regard.”

The bereaved family had initially expressed concern about who is going to stand the expense for the body to be transported to Guyana.

When contacted, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials were reluctant to comment on the matter.

Hours after leaving her homeland, the 57-year-old from Williamsburg, Corentyne, Berbice, died when a nine-seater Montserrat-bound Britten-Norman Islander crashed shortly after takeoff from Antigua.

The family indicated that the fatal journey marked the woman’s first air trip. She was on her way to see her hospitalized, pregnant daughter who lives in Montserrat. Her son-in-law, Krishan Khan, was awaiting her at the Montserrat Airport.

He, however, suspected something had happened after there was an unusually lengthy delay. His worst fears were confirmed when the airport authorities informed him that the plane had crashed during take- off on Runway Seven at the VC Bird International Airport, Antigua.

Khan immediately informed the woman’s relatives in Guyana.

Poligadu made the connecting flight from Guyana to Trinidad from where she took a plane to Antigua.

Speculation is that weather conditions may have been a factor in the crash. There had been heavy rains accompanied by thunder and lightning before and around the time of the crash.

Meanwhile, reports are that Fly Montserrat was grounded on Wednesday by authorities. The airline on Tuesday received a letter from the Eastern Caribbean Civil Aviation Authority restricting it from flying to any Eastern Caribbean member state, the rjrnewsonline.com reported yesterday.

Montserrat Premier Reuben Meade confirmed that the ban will remain in place until the airline meets certain requirements.

The Eastern Caribbean CAA ban follows another incident in which a Fly Montserrat aircraft, carrying seven passengers from Antigua, rolled onto the grass on landing at John Osborne Airport in Montserrat on Tuesday morning. There was no injury and the aircraft was not damaged. The airport has been closed until the aircraft can be moved for further investigation.

Saturday 20 October 2012

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Dundas’s haunted heritage

Read the following story about the 'legacy' a temporary mortuary location may leave behind years after its use. This is an important consideration when choosing a location for a temporary mortuary after a disaster. This has similarities to the use of refrigration trucks provided by local butchers for example. Here's the story:

Dundas District is an old high school (built in 1929), which has recently been converted into a condominium complex. It was used as a morgue after a horrific train crash and has been haunted ever since.

On Christmas night in 1934, a train derailed on the tracks just above the school and the auditorium of the school was used as a morgue for the victims of the crash. 18 people were killed and it’s rumoured that their bodies still roam the halls at night. There have been many eyewitness accounts of paranormal activity, including the story of an ex-principal who stayed at the school late to catch up on work only to see his office sabotaged by spirits that he could not see.

The ghosts of the train crash aren’t the only ones who haunt the school. There was also a pact made by five janitors two decades later and the pact was whoever died first was to haunt the school, like the victims of the crash. Russell, the janitor who came up with the pact, died first. There have been many stories of Russell’s ghost lurking the third floor, where his janitorial closet was. He’s said to be a friendly ghost who liked to play pranks on students and faculty. Former janitors have said their mop buckets had been moved, chairs had stacked on tables of classrooms they’ve yet to clean, and some hallways were already moped before they had the chance to clean them.

All these stories may just be urban legend, but they’re stories that have been circulated among the Dundas community for many years. Ask anyone who has attended Dundas District and they’ll certainly have a haunted story to tell.

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://www.satelliteonline.ca/2012/10/19/hamiltons-haunted-heritage/

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Another black Saturday on Ogun Expressway - 33 die in Ogun crash

No fewer than 33 people were feared dead yesterday, when a luxury bus conveying them plunged into a river at J4 area, along the Ogbere axis of Sagamu-Ore-Benin Expressway.

Three persons, including a pregnant woman, however, survived the incident, which occured about noon.

The Nigerian Compass on Saturday learnt that the vehicle was still in the river as at 6:30 p.m. while rescue efforts were being intensified to find other bodies possible survivors.

Sources said the bus, loaded with an unknown number of passengers, veered off a dual-carriage bridge on the expressway, before plunging into the river.

It was not known where the bus was coming from or heading to as at press time.

Officials of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) and Traffic Compliance and Enforcement Corps (TRACE) were moblised to the scene immediately after the accident.

FRSC Unit Commander, Ijebu-Ode, Mr. Seidu Osilama, confirmed the accident, yesterday.

Osilama could, however, not ascertain the number of casualties, saying rescue measures were being put in place to use local divers and cranes to bring out the bus and possible survivors inside the water.

It was gathered that the pregnant woman, who escaped death in the mishap, hung on a tree.

Ogun State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Mr. Muyiwa Adejobi, could not be reached for comment on the incident

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://www.compassnewspaper.org/index.php/component/content/article/35-headlines/8921-another-black-saturday-on-ogun-expressway-33-die-in-ogun-crash

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Shock Fate Of India's 'Stolen' Slum Children

Shocking new crime figures have revealed as many as 50,000 children are going missing from the streets of India every year.

Campaigners claim the youngsters are often 'stolen' by criminal gangs to fuel a growing black market in child labour and prostitution.

For the parents of the victims the not knowing what has happened to their son or daughter is often the hardest part.

Kunwar Pal is overcome with grief. His 12-year-old son Ravi went out for a bike ride two years ago but never returned.

He said: "My life revolved around my son but since he disappeared I have lost everything including my happiness and my job."

It is the poorest families who are most at risk from the growing problem.

Children from the slums are easily snatched from the streets as their parents are often both working and struggling to make ends meet.

One of the worst affected areas is New Delhi.

According to recent crime data, as many as 20 children go missing in the capital every day and at least five of them are never traced.

The police say their job as investigators is made much more difficult because poorer parents often do not even have a photograph of their missing child.

They have now launched a scheme using theatre to try and educate children about the dangers of stranger danger.

They are also taking portraits of children in the areas the human traffickers target, so if the worst does happen, the parents at least have a photographic record of the child they can show detectives.

But many parents with missing children say the police are simply not doing enough.

Tajwar Sultana says her granddaughter, who was three when she vanished in 2009, is just another statistic for the police to ignore.

The family were at a wedding party when their little girl was taken.

She said: "Her mother is in a terrible state. Our situation is worse than death."

There are now demands for tougher punishments for the human traffickers who prey on India's children.

But activists fear as the police struggle with the enormity of the challenge the problem of India's 'stolen' sons and daughters will continue to get worse.

Rajesh was 14 when he disappeared. Beneath a mop of jet black hair, his clear brown eyes glance sideways out of the picture that is all his family have left of him.

He was his parents' only son and they doted and relied on him. One morning in April last year, his mother, Sunita, asked him to go out to fetch water. She remembers him loading the empty plastic containers on to his cart and setting off cheerfully down the lane. It was the last time she saw him. Rajesh, like tens of thousands of other Indian children every year, had simply vanished.

'It would have been better that he died,' she says, tugging at her headscarf and dabbing at tears. 'At least then I would have known, but now I don't know whether he is alive or dead.'

Official figures show that 44,000 children disappear each year in India. Some are eventually recovered, but one in four remain untraced. Yet, with many parents reporting that police are reluctant to register cases or investigate and other parents complicit in the sale of their own children, the true figure is believed to be much higher - with some estimates of up to a million children every year.

Investigations by Indian authorities and aid agencies have found that many children are kidnapped and sold for adoption, into slavery, or worse. They believe that some end up in the UK.

A new report by India's human rights commission says that, while some of the children are killed almost immediately, others are 'working as cheap forced labour in illegal factories/establishments/homes, exploited as sex slaves or forced into the child porn industry, as camel jockeys in the Gulf countries, as child beggars in begging rackets, as victims of illegal adoptions or forced marriages, or perhaps worse than any of these as victims of organ trade and even grotesque cannibalism.'

Every day there are pictures in the classified sections of children who have vanished. 'Search for kidnapped boy,' one advert began last week. 'Abhayjeet Singh, 13, 5'2'. Kidnapped on 13 August in Prashant Vihar.' Hundreds more are listed in the books of organisations trying to help the parents who search for years in the hope of finding their lost children: Anikat, eight months old, missing since July 2003; Sultana, five, disappeared in 2007; Nitesh Kumar, seven; Sunita, five ... the list goes on.

The plight of the disappeared has been brought home to India by fresh revelations about the abduction and sale of children, often to order. An adoption agency and orphanage trading as Malaysian Social Services, in Chennai, is accused of acquiring children from criminal gangs who had taken them from the poorest parts of southern India.

The children were renamed and prospective adoptive parents were presented with faked pictures of mothers they believed were offering the children up for adoption. Seven people have been arrested after some of the children were found in Australia. A previous investigation into another Indian agency revealed that two children adopted by an Australian couple had been sold by their drunken and abusive father without their mother's knowledge for the equivalent of £20.

India has a huge problem with orphanages crammed with genuinely unwanted children; it is estimated that there are 11 million abandoned children in the country and last year the Indian government's Central Adoption Resource Authority announced that it planned to make international adoption easier, especially for British parents.

But it is those children who have been taken from loving homes without the consent of their parents that is causing the concern. Last week, Dan Toole, the South Asia regional director of Unicef, said he believed the UK was one of the main destination countries, a view supported by India's National Centre for Missing Children. 'In India you also have children being trafficked to Europe, to the USA, to the Far East, primarily for labour and sexual exploitation,' Toole said.

International adoption was also a serious problem, he added, though researchers were hampered by a lack of official statistics. Asked if some of those offered for adoption ultimately ended up in the UK, he replied: 'I would guess so but we don't have numbers on them. I know international adoptions are happening in India. [Parents] come from almost every Western nation.'

Anuj Bhargava, managing trustee of India's National Centre for Missing Children, said that in most cases of international adoption, parents were unaware of what had happened. Referring to international adoption in general, he said: 'In a lot of cases, children are being sent to foreign countries. We have been contacted by children who have been kidnapped in India and adopted through an orphanage by foreign parents.' By the time the children were old enough to explain what had happened, it was too late, he said. 'A lot of cases of this type are happening. I believe people from abroad pay a lot of money to get the child adopted.'

For the families whose children are snatched to meet this demand, the heartache is unbearable. Many search for years in the hope of one day finding their children again. Sitting in a small room in the village of Neb Sarai in south Delhi, Sunita stares at the picture of Rajesh. She is a small woman, dressed in a black sari decorated in red and orange detail. She is unwell today, because yesterday she walked eight miles to the satellite city of Gurgaon in the baking sun looking for her boy. Rajesh, who was unable to speak because of a birth defect, disappeared on 26 April last year.

Sunita has two daughters, aged four and five, but Rajesh was her only son. 'I spend most of my time crying,' she says, dabbing again at her tears. Rajesh had left the house at 10am. When he had not come back by 1pm, she started worrying. He had only drunk a small cup of tea in the morning, and would be hungry. 'I started searching for him with my friends. Late at night, about midnight, I went to the police to file a report. They wrote it down but when I went back again the next day they threatened to slap me if I bothered them again.

'The police said it was their responsibility to file a report and that was where their job ended. They said it was my responsibility to find him. I was so terrified that I would be thrashed that I did not go again.'

Instead, she started to search the city, and never stopped. 'I only knew that he may have been kidnapped. I don't know why someone would take him.' The sobs become more intense. 'He used to smile a lot, that's what I remember whenever I am going to sleep. I can see his smile. But no one cares about it. No one will listen. Whenever I prepare food for my girls I think of him and how he would have enjoyed the meal too and now I don't enjoy cooking any more.'

Delhi has the second highest official abduction rate in India, after Kolkata. The Nav Shristi (New Birth) organisation helps parents in the Neb Sarai area of the city whose children have disappeared. It has a long list of children on its books, some missing for years. It produces plastic-wrapped cards for them to show to people; a photograph, the child's name and the date they went missing. Its files contain reports on each case, sad little typed form letters with the name of the missing child inked in and a picture pinned to one corner of the sheet.

'I am the father/mother/guardian of Sanjay missing since 02/06/05,' one reads. 'I did my best to locate him/her but failed. I have tried to lodge my complaint in Sangam Vihar police station but deliberately the officer in charge of said police station declined to entertain my complaint.'

Vikas was 10 when he vanished seven years ago. His black and white picture shows a small boy with big eyes. One of a family of three boys and two girls, he had been doing well at school, especially mathematics, but classes had broken up for the summer.

His mother, Kamini, remembered him running off with his friends to play. She had not seen him since. 'He went to the playground with his friends at about 6am, but he did not come back. His friends said he was playing with them and then they noticed he was not there. They began searching for him but couldn't find him. He must have been abducted,' she said.

The police took their report and said they would call if they heard anything, but seven years later, the call has never come. 'My friends said he would be fine and that one day he would come home, but he has not. For the first three or four years I spent every penny on searching for him. I searched the whole of Delhi. Once a year I go to my home in Bihar to look for him and whenever a lead comes up, I go,' she said.

Anuradha Maharishi, from the child charity Bal Raksha (formerly the Indian branch of Save the Children) said children from the poorest areas were the most common targets.

'Sometimes they are lured with food or told they will have a better life and they come voluntarily,' she said. 'Children say they have been given a sedative injection and they wake up and find they are in a railway station and if they make a sound they are burned with cigarettes.'

She said that changes to the adoption laws had made it likely that more children would end up abroad. 'There is a business of taking children and putting them up for adoption,' she said. 'It is a big big issue. What people think of as legitimate adoption agencies are actually stealing them and selling these children to desperate parents.'

A spokesman for the British High Commission in Delhi said anyone from the UK planning to adopt in India should seek advice from the Foreign Office. But for the parents of the children who are taken, it is often too late.

'It is true: missing is worse than death,' said Anuj Bhargava. 'If a child dies, the parents know they are gone, but if they are missing, they die every day.'

Saturday 10 October 2012

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/shock-fate-indias-stolen-slum-children-020857110.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/07/india.humantrafficking

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Many students killed in bus crash in south-west Iran

At least 26 students have been killed and a further 12 injured in a bus crash in south-western Iran, the country's media report.

The driver lost control while driving the bus at high speed in wet weather and it overturned, a police official was quoted as saying by state radio.

It was travelling between Izeh and Lordegan, about 500km (310 miles) south-west of the capital Tehran.

Iran has one of the worst road safety records in the world.

Road traffic accidents kill nearly 28,000 people and injure or disable 300,000 people a year in Iran, a country of 75 million people, according to statistics from Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund.

Road accidents occur at a rate 20 times higher than the world average in Iran, Unicef said.

The number of people who survived the crash was put variously at 12 and 14.

The injured were being treated in nearby hospitals, the Fars news agency reports.

Saturday 20 October 2012

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20014662

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