Turkey pays final respects to soldiers killed in helicopter crash

Politicians, military officers and thousands others paid their final respects to soldiers who were killed in a helicopter crash in the eastern province of Siirt,in an official ceremony held at Diyarbakır's main airport on Sunday.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Chief of General Staff Gen. Necdet Özel, Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Atalay and many other ministers were present at the ceremony for the 17 soldiers killed while on duty.

The soldiers perished on Saturday when their helicopter crashed in southeastern Turkey, according to Turkish officials. The Sikorsky helicopter reportedly crashed into a mountain called Herekol in the Pervari region of Siirt province due to adverse weather conditions. Siirt Governor Ahmet Aydın said all of the soldiers aboard the helicopter were killed in the crash.

Fourteen of the victims were members of the gendarmerie forces, and the rest were helicopter crew, he said. The soldiers were being transported to a region near the Turkish border with Iraq to help troops in their fight against terrorists. Aydın said three officers, four noncommissioned officers, one special sergeant and nine privates were killed in the crash.

Following the ceremony, Spc. Sgt. Murat Yıldızhan's body was taken by ambulance to the Çermik district of Diyarbakır to be buried, while the 16 other soldiers' bodies were sent to their hometowns by military cargo plane.

President Abdullah Gül offered his condolences to families of the soldiers on Saturday and noted that they had defied the heavy weather and taken off in the helicopter to help their colleagues.

Talking about the accident at a meeting in Parliament on Saturday, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç said: “One of our military helicopters unfortunately hit a mountain due to a dense fog following heavy rains over the past days in the Pervari region. This is an accident caused completely by a technical failure and weather conditions. We are deeply saddened.”

Witnesses also ruled out the prospects of a terrorist attack. Köprüçay neighborhood head F. Mustafa Çiftçi, who stated that the helicopter crashed in an area between the villages of Köprüçay and Bilgili, said there were no clashes in the region.

Deadly clashes between the Turkish security forces and the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are frequent in the country's Southeast. The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the EU and the United States, has been waging a bloody war in the country's southeast since 1984, killing more than 40,000 people so far.

Çiftçi said the helicopter crashed after it hit a rock ledge at the foot of Herekol. “When we went to the scene of the incident, we saw the wreckage of a helicopter that had hit a ledge 150 meters in size. The helicopter was in pieces and had fallen onto a deep slope. Several helicopters were dispatched to the region after the accident. Soldiers went down to the slope with the help of ropes and retrieved the bodies of the soldiers,” Çiftçi explained.

A similar helicopter accident took place in the Dağlıca neighborhood of Hakkari province on July 22. A Sikorksy helicopter that had taken off from a military base in the Yüksekova district crashed due to a technical failure near Dağlıca, killing four soldiers and injuring eight others.

The helicopter crash in Siirt left heartbreaking stories behind the soldiers killed in the tragedy.

The family of Spc. Sgt. Mesut Şeker (32), who are residents of Konya, was devastated upon learning of the death of their son. Şeker's mother Ayşe said she had a dream a week ago in which she was wearing a wedding dress.

“I wore the wedding dress and took it off. I told myself that a white wedding dress in a dream is a symbol of a shroud. It turned out to be my son's shroud. I had not seen my son for two years, and I have missed him terribly,” she said. Şeker lost his father when he was only 4 years old.

The family of noncommissioned officer Vedat Avcı (25) in Denizli province was overcome by grief when they learned of Avcı's death. The late soldier's uncle said: “What can I say? I offer my condolences to all of Turkey. On the phone, he told us they were going out on a military operation; he did not say anything else.”

Kamer, mother of Halil İbrahim Çelik, another soldier lost in the crash, was rushed to the hospital after she learned about her son's death. Çelik lost his father three months ago.

There was also grief in the house of Lt. Yakup Çınar, who had been a helicopter pilot for the past five years. Çınar married two-and-a-half years ago and leaves behind him a pregnant wife. Spc. Sgt. Ömer Büyükköse, another victim of the helicopter crash, had recently gotten engaged and was to be married 20 days after the tragedy occurred.

Sunday 11 November 2012

http://www.todayszaman.com/news-297821-turkey-pays-final-respects-to-soldiers-killed-in-helicopter-crash.html

Burma earthquake leaves at least 12 feared dead

A 6.8-magnitude earthquake has struck northern Burma, destroying a bridge and a gold mine and leaving up to 12 people feared dead.

The full extent of the damage unclear caused by the quake on Sunday morning remains unclear as the country has a limited official disaster response system.

Mandalay, Burma's second-biggest city and the nearest population hub to the earthquake, reported no casualties or widespread damage. The city lies about 72 miles south of the quake's epicentre, near the town of Shwebo.

The US Geological Society reported a 5.8-magnitude aftershock, but there were no initial reports of additional damage or casualties. An official from Burma's meteorological department said the quake struck at 7.42am local time.

Smaller towns closer to the quake's epicentre were worse hit. A report on state television, MRTV, said 100 homes, some government buildings and a primary school were damaged in Thabeikyin, a gold-mining town not far from the epicentre. It said four people had been killed and 53 injured, with another four missing – a death toll lower than independently compiled tallies of about a dozen.

The area surrounding the epicentre has several gemstone mines, many of which are said to have collapsed. The biggest single death toll was reported by a local administrative officer in Sintku township, on the Irrawaddy River near the quake's epicentre, who said six people had died there and 11 injured.

He said some of the dead had been miners, who were killed when a gold mine collapsed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because local officials are not allowed to release information to the media.

Rumours circulated in Rangoon of other mine collapses trapping workers, but none of the reports could be confirmed.

According to news reports, several people died when a bridge under construction across the Irrawaddy river collapsed east of Shwebo. The bridge linked Sintku, 40 miles north of Mandalay on the east bank of the Irrawaddy, with Kyaukmyaung on the west bank.

The Weekly Eleven magazine website said four people had been killed and 25 injured when the bridge, which was under construction, fell. The local government said two had died in the collapse and 16 injured. All of the victims are believed to be construction workers.

The website also reported that two monasteries in Kyaukmyaung had collapsed, killing two people.

"This is the worst earthquake I felt in my entire life," said Soe Soe, a 52-year-old Shwebo resident. She said the large concrete gate of a local monastery had crumbled and several sculptures from another pagoda had been damaged.

Further damage was reported in Mogok, a key gem-mining area east of the quake's epicentre. Temples were battered there, as were some abandoned mines.

"Landslides occurred at some ruby mines, but there were no casualties because these are old mines," Sein Win, a Mogok resident told Weekly Eleven.

State television reported that more than a dozen pagodas and stupas in five townships had been damaged, with many of their so-called umbrellas atop the dome-shaped structures destroyed. The uppermost parts of the domes usually contain encased relics of the Buddha and sometimes jewels. Damage to them is viewed as a particularly bad omen. A witness said police were guarding a damaged stupa and its exposed relics in Mogok.

A resident of Naypyitaw, 225 miles south of the epicentre, said several windows of the parliament building had been broken.

The quake was also felt in Bangkok, the capital of neighbouring Thailand.

It comes a week before a scheduled visit to Burma by President Barack Obama. He will be the first US president to visit the former pariah nation, which is emerging from decades of military rule.

The disaster is the second to strike the area in three days. On Friday, a tanker train derailed about 80 miles north of Shwebo, killing at least 25 people when overturned carriages burst into flames.

Many people in Burma are superstitious, and soothsayers have pointed out that the quake occurred on the 11th day of the 11th month.

Sunday 11 November 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/11/burma-earthquake-feared-dead

Ghana: Rescuers still work in collapsed building

Workers had congregated for morning prayers on the ground floor of the Melcom retail store in northern Accra Wednesday morning at around 9:15 when they heard a "boom, boom, boom" and the five-story building collapsed around them, trapping some 80 people under the rubble and killing at least 17.

"Next thing all I could see was darkness," said Lawrence Darkwah from his hospital bed in Accra Saturday. While lying on the ground in the rubble, Darkwah heard an air-conditioner whirring and moved toward it, on the way coming across a head with long hair. He sat on the air-conditioner in the dark. Like many other survivors he couldn't telephone anyone because he had followed protocol for the prayers and left his phone at the door.

Ghana's National Disaster Management Organization cited structural weakness as the cause of the collapse of the store, which was being leased by Melcom Ltd., Ghana's largest retail chain. Investigations are on-going, officials say.

Rescue workers from the country's police, army and fire service, along with independent contractors and people from the neighborhood rushed to the scene Wednesday morning to search for survivors. The operation was chaotic, with bystanders blocking rescue crews and bulldozers digging into the rubble before it had been checked for bodies.

As a giant excavator tore into a pile of cement and metal wreckage, contractor Daniel Hani yelled: "No, no, no! He has to stop that!" When asked if bodies could be inside, he said, "There could be!"

Darkwah, the survivor, said he saw a crack in one of the building's pillars the day before the collapse, and that he alerted his boss. "I told my branch manager. He later said it was checked and it was just a crack," Darkwah said Saturday.

Vice-president Kwesi Amissah-Arthur declared the collapse a national disaster and Ghana's president John Dramani Mahama interrupted his political campaign for reelection in December to help manage the rescue efforts.

"Whoever is responsible for this negligence ... will pay a price," Mahama told reporters after briefly visiting the site in Accra's working-class Achimota neighborhood.

The president warned "that Ghana being an earthquake prone zone, the likelihood for many buildings of poor quality to go down in case of earthquake is high. We are going to put in place mechanisms to check the safety and security of other high-rise buildings and find out if there aren't any more of such disasters waiting to happen."

By Saturday, the scene was orderly and about half of the rubble had been removed. In areas that had been inspected for bodies, excavators were dropping heaps of debris into dump trucks.

The loud idling of trucks and machinery drowned out the possibility of hearing voices within the rubble. Ablakwa said rescue workers aren't relying on voices to find anyone anymore. "If anyone is in there (alive), they are very weak," he said.

Nine separate holes have so far been dug to the point which used to be the ground floor.

We understand that a heavy pillar is lying on two persons, and because of the size of the pillar, it is difficult to remove the bodies. The rescue team are therefore breaking the pillars into pieces to be able to shed off some load, so they can have access to the bodies.

We also understand that five days on, a stench from the dead bodies which are yet to be removed, is taking over the debris. The rescue team are now using disinfectants to help them reduce the stench before going into the holes.

While many have lost hope of finding anymore persons alive under the debris, the rescue team, who have been working day and night since the collapse have not given up hope.

Authorities still don't know the number of people remaining inside, said Asomaning Odei-Mensah, the chief disaster control officer of the National Disaster Management Organization. The store management originally estimated some 55 people were inside but 79 have already been pulled out.

Some are surprised the death toll is not higher given the level of destruction.

Deputy health minister Robert Mettle-Nunoo told The Associated Press the rescue operation was eased by the fact that so many employees were in the same area, where they had congregated to pray.

Rescue efforts were also helped by a team of 18 experts from Israel who arrived Thursday with lasers and highly-trained sniffer dogs to help locate bodies in the ruins.

But by Saturday evening, not everyone had found their loved ones.

Twenty-five-year-old Matilda Atantues stood behind police lines waiting for word of her sister. She said on Wednesday morning Ruth Atantues, 22, a cleaner at Melcom, left for work at 7 a.m. and never came back. Matilda and other relatives have been to every hospital looking for Ruth, she said. After three days, Matilda was back standing in the heat on the busy thoroughfare next to the building's ruins waiting for word. "After three days we are not ready to give up hope," said Atantues. "It's our hope that she is inside and OK."

Sunday 11 November 2012

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j4ltdWyw6D9hRA3-Mgio_E2vY-Lg?docId=b2ffb116f50e42fb8d0046a8509fda4b

Missing bodies in Algerian bank plane crash found

The bodies of the two passengers missing after the crash of an Algerian military plane in southern France have been found in the wreckage, investigators announced Saturday.

The body of the pilot and three passengers were found in the crashed plane on Friday shortly after the plane crashed in a mountainous area in France’s most thinly populated department, Lozère, but the twin-engine Casa 295 was known to be carrying six people in all.

Rescue workers were sent to search for them but on Saturday afternoon their corpses were found in the badly mangled wreckage.

The black boxes have also been found, making it possible to establish the cause of the crash.

Officials say that the plane’s fall from the sky was abrupt, explaining why it broke in two when it hit the ground.

Police have ruled out the hypothesis that the crew was trying to carry out an emergency landing because the terrain was unsuitable.

The plane was carrying paper on which the Bank of Algeria was to print bank notes.

Sunday 11 November 2012

http://www.english.rfi.fr/africa/20121111-missing-bodies-algerian-bank-place-crash-found

Identifying Jane/John Does

About 4:35 p.m. on March 1, 1992, a Nebraska trucker pulled into the Bitter Creek truck turnout on Interstate 80 to switch fuel tanks. Sipping coffee into the fading daylight hours, Barbara Leverton's eyes focused on what appeared to be a couple of trash bags in the distance.

"Something about the curve," the now 73-year-old said recently, suggested the bags were in the shape of a person.

Leverton walked to where she could look directly over the shape and saw a body lying in the snow at the bottom of the embankment. The instance predated ubiquitous cellphone use, so Leverton radioed -- to anyone -- what she found. Another trucker forwarded the transmission to law enforcement.

The woman, now known only as Bitter Creek Betty, was on her stomach with her head turned, completely nude.

There are hundreds of women Bitter Creek Betty definitely isn’t. In the 20 years since her death, officers, forensic scientists and armchair detectives have painstakingly established this as one of the case’s certainties.

In 2011, Betty’s information was entered into a national database called NamUs. The system houses the often-scattered evidence of unidentified victims from various agencies into one centralized location. It additionally holds a missing persons database that automatically checks for potential matches with unidentified remains.

As of August, NamUs has had a direct hand in reuniting 117 bodies with their identities. Despite the exponential advancements in DNA and other technologies in recent decades, Bitter Creek Betty and at least 10 other Wyoming Jane and John Does rest in a nameless purgatory.

Betty and her fellow Sweetwater County Does are buried, sans headstones, somewhere underneath a narrow swath of grass that buffers the road and the named decedents at Rest Haven Memorial Gardens cemetery.

There is currently no protocol in Wyoming that requires county law enforcement officials to report unidentified remains or missing persons to any statewide or nationwide agency. Therefore no exhaustive list of remains exists for the state. All records are maintained by the county coroner's offices. The Star-Tribune was able to reach 21 of the 23 coroners in Wyoming to obtain such a list, and found that there are at least 11 modern, nonprehistoric remains in the state, dating to the 1980s. Five of these remains have been entered into the NamUS network, two on a volunteer-run “Doe Network,” and two on Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation website, one of which was actually found in Colorado. Only one, a Jane Doe from Sheridan, appears on all three. Steve Holloway, deputy director at Wyoming DCI’s state crime lab said all state-aided investigations are predicated on reporting from the counties. There is no protocol for them to perform state reviews, and no statute that requires local agencies to ask for assistance. The Wyoming Crime Lab has the only forensic laboratory in the state, he said, and works closely with several nationwide networks, such as NamUs and the University of North Texas’ Center for Human Identification.

Holloway said identifying bodies “depends quite a bit” on whether the local agencies report missing people and obtain DNA samples from relatives, “so there’s something to identify those unidentified bodies to.”

There soon may be a new law to incentivize local law enforcement to do so.

Jan Smolinski, mother of Billy Smolinski, helped her state pass a law that requires Connecticut law enforcement to take missing adult cases seriously.

On Aug. 24, 2004, 31-year-old Billy vanished from his home in Waterbury, Conn. His family was required to wait three days to report him missing, but after filing the report, Jan Smolinski said police still did next to nothing.

It took four years before his case was filed correctly in the National Crime Information Center computer index, she said, and it wasn’t until the FBI was involved that proper reports and DNA samples were filed.

She’s now looking nationally. “Billy’s Law” would provide grants to law enforcement to promote reporting to NamUS and NCIC, as well as linking the two databases.

After her ordeal, Smolinski describes agency reporting as a complete “disconnect” and feels that simply informing officers of the new technologies would facilitate sharing information.

“It’s so important to get [identifying information] into the database,” she said. “NamUs is fantastic … it’s like having a million eyes looking at it at one time.”

Billy’s Law was passed by the U.S. House in 2010 but was opposed by a senator from Oklahoma. Its funding has been decreased from $10 million to $8 million and was recently reintroduced into Congress. Smolinski said they are now looking for U.S. co-sponsors, and are hoping it will be voted on again this year.

One of NamUs and Wyoming’s most recent successes was Rosella Lovell -- a former Jane Doe who was identified through facial reconstruction, dental records and a dedicated local team.

“We tried a billion different things,” said Albany Coroner Kathleen Vernon-Kubichek “It was difficult because I really cared about identifying her. I thought about it all the time.”

Once former Wyoming Crime Lab Director Sandy Mays completed the facial reconstruction last month and local media published the work, the calls started coming in.

“After hearing from all these people that it was the same person, we were able to get her dental records,” Vernon-Kubichek said. “Anybody who could have looked at them could tell it was a perfect match.”

Despite being found just north of her residence in Laramie, Lovell was never connected to the body. She had no family in the area and was never reported missing.

“It’s always been a big problem for us,” said Janet Franson, the division director for NamUs in Wyoming and eight surrounding states. She currently has a caseload of more than 900 missing persons and 200 unidentified remains. “There’s a nationwide law that covers juveniles … but it’s not against the law (for an adult) to run away.”

And such could have been the case for Bitter Creek Betty, Campbell County’s Gravel Gertie or Sweetwater’s Pipeline Pete.

“Those are all people, not numbers,” Franson said. “They belong to someone.”

Every day, she said, more and more coroners, medical examiners and law enforcement officials register with NamUs.

“The more entities that we get exchanging information, the more successful we are in identifying previously unidentified remains.”

The several days following the discovery of her body were a fuss of pokes and prods for Bitter Creek Betty. Although she was probably dumped as many as five months earlier, the frigid air and snow preserved her from standard decomposition. Her face was nearly pristine.

A coroner conducted an autopsy, only after Betty's body thawed for 24 hours. As expected, the cause of death was labeled a homicide. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed with an ice pick-like tool through the left nostril, piercing the sphenoid bone.

Forensic teams were able to obtain a near perfect set of fingerprints, which were submitted to a national FBI database. After the FBI advised of negative results, the prints were submitted to all state-level agencies throughout North America; all came up empty.

The detectives launched an aggressive media campaign throughout the next weeks and months. They published and broadcast sketches and eventually actual photos of the victim’s face, after an artist had colored in her eyes.

“It’s just simple mathematics,” said Sweetwater County Detective Dick Blust, who worked on the case then and still does. “The more exposure we can get, the better chance we have of finding someone who recognizes her.”

Today, Blust still clings to hope that the case can be solved. His plain, black binder holds meticulous records of the hundreds of comparisons and subsequent eliminations his team has made over the years. The entries are brief but absolute.

"On 02/28/93, NCIC generated a possible matchup in the form of a missing person ... date of birth 06/64. The agency of origin for the potential matchup was listed as the Mills County, Iowa, Sheriff's Office.

"On 03/01/93, Commander Blust contacted Sergeant Clifford Stegall of the Mills County Sheriff's Office [Glenwood, Iowa,]; Sergeant Stegall advised that ... had been arrested on several occasions by the Denver, Colo. Police Department.

"On 03/01/93, Commander Blust contacted Senior Clerk Benita Quintana of the Denver, Colo/, Police Department., confirmed two arrests for ... and was able to eliminate her as a possible matchup through fingerprint comparison."

Other missing persons proved even easier to eliminate as matches; they had too many tattoos, a steel rod, or had never given birth -- Betty had a vertical Cesarean scar on her abdomen.

Betty’s most promising feature was her tattoo. The rose on her breast was distinct, and it not only helped eliminate several potential missing persons but led police to their only solid lead throughout the case.

After blasting that rose throughout the media, it paid off in July 1992. The rose was the work of a Tucson, Ariz., tattoo artist, the tipster said, known for inking truckers and a calligraphy Kung Fu signature.

Detectives visited with the artist, who proved to be instrumental. He remembered the woman, he said, and described her as a “leaper” -- one who travels throughout the country hitching rides from various truckers. She was reasonably intelligent, Hispanic, and spoke without an accent. He was even able to describe the clothing she was wearing that day in June 1991: A brown peasant dress with yellow flowers.

The artist agreed to be hypnotized but still was unable to recall the woman’s name or any other details.

Blust said there were a number of other times he and the team were hopeful she was about to be identified. Distraught and unflinching family members of other missing persons called. Fingerprints would extend their pain and fail to identify Betty. For a few, their relatives were later found alive.

To date, no suspects have been named in the case.

Sunday 11 November 2012

Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/identifying-jane-john-does/article_907e475c-cc03-54a2-bd55-97848afdebd8.html#ixzz2BvYNRjOa

NSHR seeks urgent steps to dispose of bodies in morgues

Mufleh Al-Qahtani, chairman of the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), has urged concerned authorities to take urgent steps to enact laws to avoid delays in repatriation or burial of dead bodies.

“It is quite unacceptable to keep bodies for several years or months in mortuaries due to delay in completing necessary procedures. There should be strict and specific provisions in the law that are binding on the concerned departments to expedite the procedures within a stipulated period of time,” said Al-Qahtani, while stressing the need for setting up of a committee to examine the current situation of hospital morgues throughout the Kingdom.

He made the comments after reports surfaced about hundreds of dead bodies, mainly of expatriate workers, lying in hospital morgues across the Kingdom for various reasons, including ongoing criminal investigations.

Speaking to Al-Riyadh newspaper, Al-Qahtani said he was disappointed over the current situation.

“The human rights of the dead should be safeguarded at any cost. A human being’s dignity and honor must be protected even after his or her death. The hospital authorities must be given the right to take steps to start procedures either for repatriation or burial at the end of a specific period of time,” he said.

The NSHR chief’s comments came at a time when authorities have instructed the concerned agencies to expedite steps to dispose of dead bodies lying in hospital morgues.

There are 169 bodies lying in the morgue of Riyadh’s King Saud Medical City (Shumaisy Hospital) alone.

Speaking to Al-Riyadh, Dr. Abdullah Al-Dosary, director of the forensic medicine department at the hospital, said the situation puts extreme pressure on the morgue. “Because of this, we won’t be in a position to cope with possible tragedies arising out of either natural calamities or major accidents,” he said.

“Our duty is only to find place to keep the bodies until completion of the procedures by the concerned agencies,” he said, adding that the order for burial of these dead bodies must come from the authorities, such as the Ministry of Interior, the governorate, police or the Prosecution and Investigation Commission.

According to Al-Dosary, the morgue has 300 drawers, of which 200 are occupied. Thirty-one bodies were taken for burial following an order issued by the Riyadh governorate a few days ago.

“As of now there are 169 bodies lying in the morgue, of which 56 belonged to foreigners with unknown identities. The morgue has the capacity to accommodate 131 more bodies,” he said.

Al-Dosary recalled that the Ministry of Interior issued an order a few years ago that forbade hospitals from keeping dead bodies in morgues beyond two months.

“According to the order, if the dead body was not identified within this period, a DNA sample must be collected and the body must be buried. The two-month deadline was given to allow the concerned diplomatic missions adequate time to complete certain procedures for their nationals.”

Al-Dosary said there are rare cases in which bodies of Saudi citizens lay unclaimed in morgues but an overwhelming majority of the dead bodies belong to foreigners.

“Our department could not identify bodies of 56 people. None of their relatives came forward to receive them. Expediting burial procedures depends on the fast action on the part of the concerned diplomatic missions,” he said while noting that the Pakistani Embassy was ahead of other embassies in extending the best possible cooperation in this respect.

Referring to the handling procedures at the morgue, Al-Dosary said: “We put the bodies in coolers for one week. In case of a delay in completion of procedures, we move the body to the freezers. Once the procedures are completed, we take out the bodies from freezers 48 hours before handing over either for repatriation or burial. We then carry out autopsy and wash the body for burial, and then embalm it in case of repatriation.”

Al-Dosary said majority of the morgue staff at Shumaisy hospital are foreigners while doctors include five Saudi women. “We handled more than 5,000 bodies, including 675 bodies linked to criminal cases, in one year. The morgue carries out an average 120 autopsies a month,” he added.

Sunday 11 november 2012

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20121111142435

Riyadh blast probe report on Monday

The panel formed by the government to investigate the causes of the fuel truck accident in eastern Riyadh early this month, which killed at least 22 people, will present its report to Interior Minister Prince Muhammad bin Naif on Monday. “The panel has compiled a comprehensive report after speaking to several officials, eyewitnesses, as well those injured in the fuel tanker explosion,” said a reliable official source, while giving details of the investigation.

The panel, he said, has seen the DNA reports, as well as the postmortem reports of the victims of the accident. He said that some people died because of “the intensity of the fire following the explosion and excess inhaling of gases.”

The investigation panel is composed of senior Saudi officials from the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Finance and Civil Defense, along with a few other government agencies.

Asked about the repatriation of bodies, Saeed A. Bawazeer, chief of the forensic center at King Saud Medical City, said the bodies of 10 foreign workers including five Pakistani expatriates will be repatriated in a timely schedule this week. “All necessary documentation is over and we are only waiting for some last-minute formalities,” he said. The arrangements are being made in cooperation with respective Asian embassies to send the bodies, said Bawazeer.

“However, DNA testing is being done on the bodies of some other migrant workers for proper identification before their remains can be flown home,” said the Saudi health official. He said the Saudi authorities gave the green signal to repatriate the bodies as per the wishes of the family members of those killed in the accident.

Bawazeer said bodies of seven Saudis, one Egyptian and one Pakistani have been buried locally so far. He said 10 other bodies including seven of Pakistani workers, one Bangladeshi worker and a Nepalese worker, will be repatriated in the next few days as per the wishes of their relatives.

“The bodies of three of the victims have not been identified and no one has come forward to claim them."

"Two bodies identified as those of Pakistani workers are undergoing DNA tests at the moment,” said Pakistani Ambassador Mohammed Naeem Khan, yesterday. “Another Pakistani worker is recovering at the local National Guard Hospital,” he added.

Asked about the status of Nepalese workers, who were killed and injured during the explosion, Umesh Kumar Mudbari, a spokesman of the Nepalese Embassy, said that the body of the sole Nepalese victim will be sent to Katmandu within a few days. He pointed out that two Nepalese workers were injured during the accident. “One of the injured workers has already been released after treatment, while the other is still undergoing treatment,” Mudbari added. Officials from the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh are set to visit the Filipino driver of the fuel truck held in custody by the authorities. A statement released by the Philippine’s Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez said that Philippine Ambassador Ezzedin Tago is planning to visit Ruben Kebeng.

Florentino Santiago, a Filipino, was among the dead. The explosion also injured 10 Filipinos. Philippine officials have offered legal assistance to driver Kebeng. Apart from the human casualties, the explosion also inflicted a heavy loss of property, estimated to exceed SR 300 million so far.

Sunday 11 November 2012

http://www.arabnews.com/riyadh-blast-probe-report-monday

Ghana mall rescuers discover six more bodies

Rescuers at the site of a collapsed mall in Ghana on Saturday said they had identified six more bodies under the rubble, as an Israeli team providing technical support pulled out.

"The Israelis, after providing technical support and help in the rescue process are due to leave tonight (Saturday). So far 12 people have been confirmed dead," police spokesman Freeman Tettey told AFP.

The team from Israel on Thursday joined the search at the site after the collapse of a six-storey Melcom mall building.

He said that rescuers had on Saturday seen six more bodies under the rubble.

"The rescuers can see six more people under the rubble. We don't know if they are alive or dead. Access to them is very difficult but hopefully, we will get to them because 50 percent of the rubble has been cleared so far. The search is continuing," he said.

Two bodies were brought out late Friday, taking the death toll in the disaster from 10 to 12.

Rescuers had not pulled out anybody on Saturday, dead or alive, Tettey said.

Meanwhile, there was no news of one victim buried in the rubble who spoke to an official on a mobile phone on Friday and said that four people were trapped at a particular location.

Major Jonah Wiafi told journalists that he spoke by phone on Friday to a woman who informed him that four people were trapped at the location.

He said that rescuers have managed to pull 75 people from the rubble alive.

It was not clear how many people were inside the building when it collapsed ahead of opening time on Wednesday. Police had initially said around 50 employees worked there, but the number of people located has far exceeded that.

An official investigating the collapse said the building, which opened early this year, lacked a permit and cited structural failure as the cause, adding that the concrete mix used did not appear up to standard.

The Melcom Group of Companies, based in Ghana, includes extensive retail outlets, according to its website.

The six-storey shopping centre that collapsed on November 7, 2012 in Accra, killing at least three people and trapping dozens of others.

Sunday 11 November 2012

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