Key Suspect Dead in NE China Bus Explosion

The key suspect in a bus explosion that killed 11 people in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province has been found dead in the blast, local government said Sunday.

A police investigation showed, Gao Wanfeng is suspected of placing the explosives on a commuter bus that blasted around 6:30 a.m. Friday in the Lingdong district of the city of Shuangyashan, according to a city government statement.

The explosion also hit a coach in the opposite lane.

Seven of the van's occupants, as well as four of the coach's, were killed in the explosion.

Police on Sunday also released an initial list of victims which was drafted after relatives identified the bodies in person.

The exact list will be released after DNA testing precisely verifies the victims' identities, the statement said.

The injured are receiving medical treatment.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://english.cri.cn/6909/2013/01/13/2724s743344.htm

5 dead, 19 injured in SW China coach accident

Five people died and 19 others were injured after a coach rolled over Sunday morning in southwest China's Guizhou province, local rescuers said.

A coach collided with a guardrail and rolled over around 5 a.m. Sunday on an expressway in Xifeng county, rescuers said.

Five people died at the scene. The injured have been taken to local hospitals, where four of them are in critical condition.

Sixty people were onboard when the accident happened.

The cause of the accident is under investigation.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-01/13/content_27672308.htm

Police Find Corpses Of Women In Ritualists’ Hideout

Police detectives in Asaba, the Delta State capital have uncovered a hideout/operational base of suspected ritualists with scores of unidentified corpses of women.

The police command spokesman, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Famous Ajieh, said the detectives acted on a tip-off to swoop on the suspects in their operational base in Okpanam village where four of them were arrested. The police, he said, found scores of mutilated and decomposed bodies of women.

It was learnt that the replacement of commercial motor cycles with tricycles popularly known as “Keke” had led to the influx of suspected ritualists who use the new means of transportation to charm unsuspecting passengers and take them to the hideouts where they are allegedly killed with vital parts of their bodies removed.

LEADERSHIP SUNDAY gathered that activities of the ritualists increased during the Yuletide in Asaba and its environs when they caught a pregnant woman on her way to church service along Nnebisi Road and allegedly hypnotised her. They allegedly took her to their hideout where she met other persons being held by the suspects.

But through divine intervention, she was said to have been pushed away when it was her turn to face the ritual exercise.

Police sources however, confirmed that four persons were arrested including their kingpin identified as Simeon (surname withheld), who upon interrogation confessed to the gang’s atrocities while three others are on the run.

Ritual activities allegedly thrive in Ibusa, Ogwashi-Uku, Ubulu-Uku and Okpanam.

While warning passengers to be wary of the operators of the “Keke,” Ajieh said their activities had been placed under serious surveillance.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://leadership.ng/nga/articles/44907/2013/01/13/police_find_corpses_women_ritualists_hideout.html

Five Feared Dead, Others Injured As Vandals Set NNPC Pipeline On Fire

About five people were feared dead Friday night during a violent clash between suspected pipeline vandals and security operatives at Arepo, in the Obafemi-Owode Local Government Area of Ogun State.

Sources say the suspected vandals and armed guards monitoring the area both suffered casualties.

It was learnt that the suspected vandals had threatened to set the pipeline ablaze, following a disagreement between the two sides.

The ones who had escaped unhurt, reportedly regrouped and attempted to evacuate the corpses of their slain colleagues, threatening not to allow anyone to enter or leave the area until they have recovered the bodies.

The vandals were also reported to have violently resisted attempts by officials of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and other villagers to conduct a rescue operation in the area.

A source, who spoke to The Guardian, said he could not ascertain the number of persons killed, but that he counted five bodies in the river.

Public Relations Officer of the NSCDC, Ogun Command, Mr. Kareem Olanrewaju, confirmed the incident but denied there were casualties.

He said the inferno, which was first noticed Friday night might have been caused by the suspected vandals, adding that the surveillance team of the corps had earlier reported suspicious movement around the Arepo waterways.

He said that when the fire outbreak occurred, a team was instructed to move in for possible arrests but that no arrests were made, as the vandals fled.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=110322:five-feared-dead-as-pipeline-vandals-security-men-clash-in-arepo&catid=1:national&Itemid=559

SHC seeks comments on delay in identifying victims

The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Saturday issued notices to the interior secretary, the provincial police chief and the SITE station house officer on a petition over the failure of the authorities to identify two victims of a Baldia garments factory fire despite the lapse of over four months.

Hussain Ahmed and Dilawar Hussain submitted that their sons, Sharjeel and Asif Aziz, who were worked as a helper and a pressman in the ill-fated factory, Ali Enterprises, lost their lives in the September 11, 2011 blaze, which claimed the lives of more than 250 employees.

They said the authorities obtained blood samples twice for identifying the victims, but despite the lapse of over four months the bodies had been neither identified nor handed over to them for funeral.

The petitioners said that despite a government announcement of compensation for the legal heirs of the victims, they were not being given any compensation. They claimed that the tragic incident had taken place due to lack of safety measures and dishonesty and negligence on the part of the factory owners, other shareholders and government departments, including labour, environment, civil defence, social security and buildings control.

They said their sons were the only breadwinners of their families, and prayed to the court to direct the authorities concerned to expedite the DNA matching process and ensure the compensation amounts as promised by the government.

A division bench, headed by Chief Justice Mushir Alam, issued notices to the interior secretary, the provincial home secretary, the IGP and the SITE SHO for January 15, and called their comments.

The SHC had earlier taken notice of the delay in the identification of 33 victims of the factory fire, and directed the police to obtain DNA reports from the Islamabad laboratory so that the bodies could be handed over to the affected families within 15 days.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-4-154021-SHC-seeks-comments-on-delay-in-identifying-victims

Prosecutors approve search for Gacy victims

Detectives who have long wondered if John Wayne Gacy killed others besides the 33 young men he was convicted of murdering may soon get to search for bodies underneath an apartment complex where his late mother once lived, a law enforcement official said Saturday.

Frank Bilecki, a spokesman for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, confirmed a Chicago Sun-Times report that Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez agreed to ask a judge for a warrant to search the housing complex on the city's Northwest Side. Such requests for search warrants are routinely approved.

Dart has been pushing Alvarez's office for months to sign off on the warrant, but Bilecki said the sheriff's office was asked for more evidence. Dart's office then found records showing that Gacy, a contractor, had done handyman work at the complex, and it located witnesses whose sworn affidavits raised intriguing questions about Gacy's activities there.

"These people in their affidavits stated that he was seen at odd hours doing odd jobs around the building," said Bilecki.

Bilecki said that investigators would bring in high-tech thermal imaging devices that detect that detect underground anomalies indicating something may have been buried. At the same time, searchers would bore holes in the ground and have FBI cadaver dogs sniff the holes' openings for the scent of human remains.

"It should initially be a pretty non-invasive (search)," said Bilecki, adding that the search could become much more involved if the initial search indicates any sign of human remains.

A search would be the latest twist in one of the most terrifying crime sprees in American history, one that ended when investigators discovered 29 bodies buried in the crawlspace of Gacy's Chicago-area home and yard in the 1970s. Gacy, who was arrested in 1978, convicted in 1980 and executed in 1994, has been the subject of countless articles and books, as well as at least one movie.

Gacy's case has remained in the headlines thanks largely to Dart, who has been trying to identify the remains of still unknown victims and who has voiced questions about whether there may be victims whose remains either haven't been found or haven't been linked to one of the most notorious serial killers in American history.

A few weeks ago, the sheriff's department announced it was submitting the DNA of Gacy and other condemned murderers who were executed in Illinois to a national database in the hopes of clearing the coldest of cold cases across the country. Detectives say that because Gacy traveled extensively, he may have killed people in other locations. Dart previously exhumed for DNA testing the remains of young men whose bodies were found in Gacy's crawlspace but never identified, an effort that led to the identification of one of the young men.

The apartment complex was searched in 1998, and more than a dozen underground anomalies were located, but for whatever reason, not all of those sites were investigated further, Bilecki said.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://www.thepublicopinion.com/news/associated_press/national/us/article_da809ff9-29ed-5e13-a5fd-1f850d8a9bd2.html

Forensic scientists are working to identify thousands of anonymous corpses along the U.S.-Mexico border

At the bottom of a freshly opened grave, two young women use brushes and dustpans to sweep the last traces of powdery south Texas soil off the coffin. It’s a little before 8 a.m. on a cloudless May morning, and the punishing sun will soon push the temperature into the 90s. Up on ground level, the excavation’s super​visor, a sprightly forensic archaeologist named Lori Baker, snaps photos of the work. All around them, granite headstones display the names of the dead buried here in the city of Del Rio’s Westlawn Cemetery—Connor, Pennington, Ramirez. Baker has come here from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, to determine the identity of the others, the ones without headstones or whose resting places bear a single word: Unknown. Many of them, she believes, are illegal immigrants who drowned in the Rio Grande or died from heat exhaustion—and whose families have no idea what became of them. “It doesn’t matter if they disappeared in the 1990s,” Baker says. “People don’t stop searching.”

Baker’s team soon gathers around the grave, and two students pry open the coffin with hammers. Inside lies a woman’s body, partially mummified. A clump of hair rests alone, like a bird’s nest, on the pillow. “Where’s the head?” someone asks. Then they spot it. Her head lies at the foot of the coffin, next to two cotton slippers—a final indignity for a woman buried without a name. The cemetery’s gravedigger says the head must have fallen off and rolled there years ago, when the coffin was dug up and moved to make room for another grave.

The decapitated woman’s exhumation is the first of many in Baker’s efforts to identify anonymous immigrants’ corpses in Texas. She will provide samples of DNA extracted from the bodies’ bones to match against databases compiled by the Mexican and U.S. governments. Her painstaking work, she hopes, will give closure to families who don’t know whether a vanished relative has died, been kidnapped, or is simply out of touch.

The number of undocumented immigrants caught by the U.S. Border Patrol has plummeted from a peak of 1.2 million in 2005 to 340,252 last year. But the number of deaths has not fallen apace; hundreds of corpses are still found every year. In 2011, 42 percent of the 357 deaths reported by the Border Patrol were in Texas, where many of the bodies are recovered from the thorny scrub of ranches. And that’s only the bodies the patrol found. My visits to county offices and graveyards, together with surveys by government officials, suggest that thousands of anonymous corpses have been buried in Texas over the last 20 years. A statewide law directs officials to collect DNA samples from unidentified corpses, but both funeral directors and law-enforcement officers tell me that doesn’t always happen. After all, only one of the 15 border counties in Texas has a fully equipped medical examiner’s office.

It’s a long-standing problem all along the border. Several years ago, Bruce Anderson of Arizona’s Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner was facing a surge in unidentified deaths, from an average of just a dozen a year to 200. “We had 100 bone samples in our freezers,” he recalls. He contacted Baker for help, knowing she had used genetics to study ancient American migrations. Baker paid her own way to Pima County and started taking DNA samples. She soon cracked her first case, identifying the remains of a mother of two who twisted her ankle while crossing into Arizona and was abandoned by her companions. The woman’s family broke into tears when television reporters interviewed them about the discovery.

The Mexican government soon gave Baker grants to sequence the DNA of 250 more bodies, yielding about 70 matches. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice began paying for the sequencing of the roughly 4,000 unidentified remains recovered on U.S. soil each year, wherever they’re found. By now, Anderson has identified 65 percent of the 2,000 anonymous cadavers found in Arizona over the past decade.

Baker, meanwhile, has shifted her modest lab’s focus to long-buried bodies. In addition to looking at DNA, she’s also analyzing trace elements found in the remains. The elements can show evidence of the person’s diet, which can help separate foreigners from locals.

Last spring’s trip to Del Rio proved how grueling her project will be. She first tried the city’s San Felipe Cemetery, but the aging groundskeeper couldn’t recall where he had buried unidentified bodies. So she moved on to Westlawn Cemetery, several miles away, which seemed to have better records. One team of her students, however, spent four days digging in the 100-degree heat before they uncovered a corpse clasping a plastic-wrapped Bible—from the Retama Manor Nursing Center. Not an unknown body after all. Baker had already spent an afternoon in the emergency room with a serious bout of heatstroke and was not pleased with one more frustration.

After 10 days of work, the group packed six bodies into the back of its trailer and headed north to begin the laboratory work. Just a few days later, a call came in to a nearby sheriff’s office. A body had been found on a remote ranch. It was going to be a long summer.

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/13/whose_body_is_this/

Costa Concordia: Hunt For Russel Rebello's Body

Missing waiter Russel Rebello last spoke to his family six days before the Costa Concordia went down.

In a phone call, he wished his wife and son a happy new year, adding how sorry he was work had taken him away from the celebrations.

Witnesses have said the last positive sighting of the Indian-born 32-year-old was as he made his way to a muster station at the restaurant at the back of the Costa Concordia, on deck five of the ship.

He is one of two people whose bodies have still not been recovered a year after cruise ship hit rocks and ran aground.

The crew member's brother Kevin has maintained a constant vigil, shuttling from his home in Milan to the island of Giglio every few weeks.

Kevin has also set up a Facebook page in memory of his brother in which he asks anyone who may have any information to contact him.

This weekend, Kevin made the journey to Giglio to gather with survivors and rescuers to remember the tragic events of January 13 last year.

He said: "I've not lost hope. I know the official search stopped a long time ago but I will continue to look for my brother's body.

"I watch every news bulletin or programme on the Concordia in the hope of finding some piece of information that will help me find my brother.

''I'm doing it not only for my own peace but also for the sanctity of my parents who are both very old.

"All they want is to give my brother a proper Christian burial. They want a tomb so that they can go there and pray for him. We are all very religious.

''For us this is something that has not stopped it has continued for weeks, months, and now we have reached the first anniversary.

"The circumstances for us are very different as we do not have a body, and we are not the only ones in that situation - one of the female passengers is also still missing.

''Those 30 people who lost loved ones on the Concordia have some closure as they have a body that they have buried and maybe a gravestone to pray at, but we don't have anything.

"More than anything we would just like to find Russel's body so we can bury him and draw a line on what happened.''

Kevin paid tribute to the islanders on Giglio and said: ''They have been so welcoming and friendly towards me. They have made me feel welcome and at home each time I go to Giglio - the mayor above all has been very friendly and warm. Giglio has become my second home."

Kevin revealed he has had several phone conversations with the Concordia's captain, who is accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship while dozens of the 4,200 passengers and crew were still on board and waiting to be rescued.

Francesco Schettino has not been charged but is living under court-ordered restrictions pending a decision on whether to indict him.

Kevin, who runs a fitness centre in Milan, said he bore no grudges against the captain, who is said to have altered the ship's course so he could carry out a sail-by-salute of Giglio and took the Concordia onto rocks, tearing a fatal 70-metre gash in its hull.

He said: ''We last spoke the day after Christmas. I wished him a merry Christmas - it was the fourth time we have spoken and we both wished each other a merry Christmas. We have never gone into the details of what happened that night. It's not up to me to judge him, that is for a court.

''I know many people would be surprised to hear that I have no bitterness towards him because people think he was responsible for what happened to my brother, but do you think by not speaking to him I will get my brother back?

''He said he regretted the incident, but what I will say is that I'm not so sure it was ultimately his fault - I think there were others involved and many people had a share of responsibility.''

Kevin added: ''All we want is for my brother's body to be found - this is very hard for all of us and I wouldn't wish it on any other family.

"My brother has a son Rhys, who is four years old - he doesn't really understand what has happened but when he is older we will tell him what a kind and good man his father was.

''We just want a body so that we can put an end to this - no-one can give us the answer to the question we want, my parents have been crying all the time, they just want my brother's body so they can grieve for him properly.

''Of course we understand that it is a difficult job, it is a massive operation and it's not something that can be done in a matter of days or weeks. When I am not on Giglio I keep track by looking at the webcam pointed on the Concordia.

''My only other prayer apart from getting my brother's body back is that no-one is killed or seriously hurt while working on salvaging the Concordia.''

Kevin also revealed how for the first time he was apprehensive about returning to Giglio for the commemoration.

'I'm looking forward to going back as I'm always made so welcome - but this time will be exactly a year after my brother was lost. It will be difficult for me and for the others there.

''When I see the ship I will be thinking of my brother, of how kind and helpful he was and how the last time he was seen he was giving life jackets out to the passengers and crew. That's the sort of man he was, he would always help people and he was always happy and smiling.

''It's difficult to put into exact words but I think this time it will be frightening to see the ship.

"A lot of people have said how it looks like something from the movies, but this isn't Hollywood this is real life.''

Sunday 13 January 2013

http://news.sky.com/story/1037400/costa-concordia-hunt-for-russel-rebellos-body