Jilin: Investigators hunt for clues to fire, DNA samples taken from relatives

Process of identifying the dead is continuing slowly, report He Na and Han Junhong in Dehui, Jilin.

Police have cordoned off the road running up to the slaughterhouse in rural northeast China where the death toll climbed to 120 in a fire early on Monday morning.

Three checkpoints were set up at varying intervals along the road from Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, to the Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co in Dehui, where only a blackened, smoking shell remained of the huge workshop.

Vehicles and pedestrians without permission to enter the area had to make detours to continue their journeys.

By mid-morning, several dozen relatives of the dead and severely injured had gathered on the road. Some were clearly agitated as they poured out their experiences during the past two days.

Most of the charred wreckage has been cleared from the smoldering ruins of the factory and staff from the Changchun Disease Control Center have disinfected the entire area with peracetic acid and quicklime.

The disinfection period will last three days, according to Wang Yanhui, director of the center.

Sources from the State Council Investigation Team said 395 workers were in the plant when the fire broke out. Seventeen are still missing, according to a report from China Central Television.

The fire, one of China's worst industrial disasters of recent years, swept through two workshops at the processing plant within minutes of a blast triggered by a suspected chemical leak, leaving 77 people injured, 15 of them in a critical condition.

Although many media reports have claimed the fire was caused by a leak of ammonia - which was used in the plant's cooling system - an investigation team from the State Council said the cause is still under investigation.

DNA tests

By Tuesday, only 67 of the dead had been identified and their bodies claimed by family members. DNA extraction work has almost finished on the bodies of those too badly disfigured to be identified by sight, according to a senior government official from Changchun, who declined to be named.

DNA has been taken from more than 100 direct relatives of presumed victims and investigation teams will soon begin the task of matching the samples with those of the deceased.

The plant is rectangular, about 400 meters long and consisted of two workshops. Almost all the survivors complained that the exits had been locked.

According to survivors, the two workshops were located in adjoining buildings and workers usually entered them via gates at the southern end. They said that as far as they knew, none of the workers who attempted to escape the inferno via the south gate had survived.

Many of the victims were couples, husband and wife teams who lived locally and worked together at the plant because its convenient location allowed them to remain close to their families. It's estimated that around 90 percent of those who lost their lives were women. The fire didn't just claim 120 lives - it also changed the destinies of their families.

A number of labor-intensive factories have been established in Dehui during recent years to stimulate the local economy. The plants attracted many young and middle-aged people, who otherwise would have headed to the coastal regions or large cities in their quest for work and a better life, according to Liu Yunbo, 44, who is being treated at Dehui Huikang Hospital.

Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co, which began operations in 2009, was the largest poultry firm in Dehui, employing more than 400 workers. However, discipline was said to have been draconian and employees were not allowed to leave their workstations without permission.

Inadequate materials

A safety inspection campaign has been carried out across Jilin province in the wake of Monday's disaster. A source from a meeting of Changchun's standing committee said the fire exposed the problems that exist in some labor-intensive enterprises. The source said fire control measures and fire exits at Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co existed in name only. Moreover, the company's workshops were constructed using combustible materials, which allowed the fire to spread at a deadly speed.

Liu Nan, a project manager at Baishun External Wall Factory, said that there are two common types of wall-construction panels; those that are flame retardant and those that are fireproof. In his experience, most of the labor-intensive factories in the province used the flame retardant panels for the sake of economy.

"It's much cheaper and can produce huge savings for companies that choose the cheaper option. Generally, the wholesale price for flame-retardant panels is about 240 yuan ($39) per square meter, while fireproof panels cost an extra 100 yuan per square meter," said Liu.

Customers generally buy a small number of fireproof panels that will pass muster when the authorities inspect the plants, he said.

Compensation

The work of arranging compensation for the injured and the families of the dead has not yet started. China Daily reporters have interviewed relatives of more than 20 victims and many injured during the past two days. None of them had been contacted by the authorities.

Yuan Yueping, 24, is receiving treatment at Dehui Fuyang Hospital after inhaling toxic fumes. He said he feels lucky to be alive and right now compensation is the last thing on his mind.

Many relatives of those who died are still too numb to consider the issue. Wang Yuli's 17-year-old sister was working at the poultry plant when the fire broke out. Nothing has been heard of her since. "My little sister is still missing and my mind is totally blank now," said Wang, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Friday 7 June 2013

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2013-06/06/content_16574078.htm

Alleged dog remains from fire turn out to be human

In what must be one of the worst cases of “mistaken identity”, the remains handed over to relatives of a missing couple, at first announced to be of their two dogs, turned out to be human. The remains have not been positively identified as those of the couple but police assured them they are working on confirming the identity of the bodies.

A fire struck a house last June 2 in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture and destroyed the house of the missing couple completely. A body part discovered inside the house, a piece of flesh from the pelvic region, is said to be that of an unidentified individual. So, the police assumed that the couple are still missing based on that recovered body part. They recovered another small part of flesh in the fire, and since the couple had two small dogs, they concluded that it was one of the dogs and handed over the remains to the couple’s relatives on June 4.

But officials from the facility where the remains were stored became suspicious that the remains were in fact from a human being. They contacted the relatives and informed them of their suspicion. They then asked the prefectural police to perform a legal autopsy, which confirmed the error made by the police officers at the scene. Tetsuya Harada, first investigation division chief from the Ibaraki Prefectural Police department, apologized to the family and blamed the error on “sloppy confirmation procedures”. They are now working double time to confirm the identities of the two sets of remains recovered from the fire.

Friday 7 June 2013

http://japandailypress.com/alleged-dog-remains-from-fire-turn-out-to-be-human-0730155

Mexico’s institutions overwhelmed by scale of forced disappearances

Mexican police officer Luis Ángel León Rodríguez disappeared along with six other officers and a civilian on Nov. 16, 2009, in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. Six days later, his mother, Araceli Rodríguez, began her ceaseless search.

In the past three and a half years, she has knocked on every door, heard from her son’s killers how his body was dismembered and buried, supposedly under an avocado tree, and helped excavate twice in a fruitless search for his and the others’ remains.

But in April an official citation was delivered to her house from the internal affairs department of the federal police, summoning León Rodríguez to appear on May 15 “without his uniform and service firearm” and “with a lawyer” to respond to charges of dereliction of duty and abandoning his post.

His mother showed up with the same photo that she has taken to protest marches and caravans by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, to meetings with then conservative president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), and to a number of interviews.

The head of the internal affairs department, Paul Aguilera, said the police do not have a complete up-to-date database making it possible to follow the precise circumstances of each officer, and that his office has 16,000 cases pending.

“What they did to me was cruel, and the worst thing is that if this can happen in my case, which is so visible, what about the thousands of others who have not drawn so much attention?” Rodríguez remarked to IPS.

Local and international human rights groups have been sounding the alert about the humanitarian tragedy in Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and forcibly disappeared since Calderón involved the military in the war on drugs. The violence has not let up since conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December.

There are 26,000 missing people in Mexico, according to a list released in February by the interior ministry. But the list does not include, for example, 86 of the 140 cases of forced disappearance documented by the New York-based Human Rights Watch in the report “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored”.

Nor does it include the victims of cases made public by the Movement for Peace in 2011, like those of environmental activists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, chess player Roberto Galván, or Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena, whose mother has held two hunger strikes to demand answers.

In a Jun. 4 report, “Confronting a nightmare: Disappearances in Mexico”, London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International talks about a “pattern of systematic disappearances and enforced disappearances largely ignored by the previous administration.”

It says “Some are the victims of enforced disappearances in which public officials are implicated. Others have been abducted by private individuals or criminal gangs.”

The rights group says that during several visits to Mexico since 2010, it documented 152 cases of disappearance, and adds that evidence of involvement of public officials was found in 85 of the cases.

It mentions cases of people apparently abducted by criminal groups for their professional skills, such as nine telephone engineers who went missing in June 2009 in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

But the available information is just the tip of the iceberg that the government of Peña Nieto risks crashing into.

Investigative reports by the daily newspaper Milenio published in October 2012, based on municipal reports, found that during the Calderón administration, at least 24,000 unidentified bodies were buried in common graves.

In Mexico there is no protocol for collecting information on missing persons, or for medical examiners to register information. Each state has its own system for identifying bodies, and the files on most unidentified corpses buried in common graves are, in the best of cases, incomplete, lacking fingerprints, photographs, dental X-rays or DNA samples. In other cases, the information in the files actually turns out to be wrong. And in some cases, unidentified bodies are even cremated.

There are only 25 forensic anthropologists in this country of 117 million people, and many mortuaries have no DNA lab. There are no standard procedures in place for exhuming and identifying bodies.

The government refuses to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian tragedy. But on Feb. 21 it signed an agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross for advice on the creation of a protocol for the search for missing persons.

There are cases like that of Bárbara Reyes, who disappeared at the age of 17 in August 2011, and whose remains were found 18 months later in a common grave. To find her body, trenches were dug along 64 metres over the space of three days. “I only recovered my daughter’s bones,” her mother, Lourdes Muñiz, told IPS.

Alejandra Viridiana was kidnapped in November 2011 from a bar on the outskirts of Mexico City. After searching through morgues far and wide, her mother, Beatriz Mejía, finally found her last month – in the morgue where she had initially reported her daughter’s disappearance.

The young woman’s body had been there two months, from December 2011 to January 2012, on the list of unidentified bodies.

“They had her there for two months and put her in a common grave. Two months when I went there practically every day to ask if they had any news! How can that be?” Mejía complained.

There are innumerable stories of families who incessantly make the rounds of cemeteries and mass graves seeking bodies buried as “NN” or Jane or John Doe or who fight to revive investigations that have been shelved.

“They told me they had no more leads to follow and that they had shelved the case,” Brenda Rangel told IPS. Her younger brother, Héctor, disappeared in November 2009 with two other people in the northern state of Coahuila.

In response to the pressure from the families, the government announced May 17 the creation of a specialised unit to investigate and search for missing people, under the attorney general’s office.

But the unit, which has begun to operate, was only assigned 12 investigators.

To complete the bleak outlook, the crisis of forced disappearances has reached the capital, which up to now had seemed off-limits to the worst displays of violence.

On May 26, 11 young people from the poor suburb of Tepito were kidnapped from a bar in the centric tourist area of Zona Rosa. The police still have no leads.

Friday 7 June 2013

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/06/mexicos-institutions-overwhelmed-by-scale-of-forced-disappearances/

Dozens killed in China bus blaze

More than 40 people have died when an express bus burst into flames on an elevated road in south-eastern China, reports say.

The blaze occurred during the evening rush hour in the port city of Xiamen, the official Xinhua News Agency said. At least 42 people died and 33 were injured.

A local fire official said bodies were piled up inside the bus. He said the cause of the fire was being investigated.

Operations of the entire express bus system, known as Bus Rapid Transit, were suspended after the accident. A survivor said she smelled petrol and then saw a fire spreading rapidly.

Photos on Chinese social media showed huge clouds of black smoke rising from the burning bus. Victims were seen bleeding with torn clothes and burned skin.

Witnesses reportedly heard sounds of explosions after the fire had been burning for about 10 minutes.

Xiamen's BRT system began operations in 2008. It covers more than 80 kilometres (50 miles) and carries more than 250,000 people each day. The buses are often crowded during rush hour.

China's public transit has been expanding rapidly over the past decade, but there are worries that the country is sacrificing safety in its rush to roll out modern services.

In 2011, a high-speed train accident near the eastern city of Wenzhou killed 40 people. Later that year, a collision on a new subway line in the financial hub of Shanghai injured hundreds of people.

Friday 7 June 2013

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/dozens-killed-in-china-bus-blaze-29328687.html

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/bus-bursts-into-flames-in-china-kills-at-least-20/story-fni0xs63-1226659997416

19 die as bus rolls into gorge in Himachal

Nineteen people, including eight women, were killed Friday and 13 injured when a private bus carrying them skidded off a road and fell into a gorge in Himachal Pradesh’s Sirmaur district, police said.

Gross human negligence was behind the accident, said the officials.

All nineteen bodies have been recovered, Superintendent of Police Sumedha Diwedi told IANS.

The bus was carrying at least 35 passengers at the time of the accident. The police officer said the injured were being treated at hospitals in Solan and Shimla towns.

The bus, ferrying people from Purandhar to Solan town, met with the accident near Bharari village in Sangrah subdivision, 130km from district headquarters Nahan.

“The driver was throwing bottles out of the bus. This led to the driver losing control over the vehicle,” one of the survivors told the police.

Most of the accident victims came from the Nohradhar and Purandhar areas.

The government has ordered an inquiry into the accident.

Governor Urmila Singh and Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh have expressed grief over the incident.

Sirmaur is one of the most remote places in the state. This was the second major accident in the state in less than a month.

Thirty-nine people were killed when a private, overloaded bus carrying 70 passengers skidded off the road and plunged into the Beas river near Kullu town May 8.

Police records say over 800 people die every year in the state in road accidents.

Police have identified 556 accident-prone spots, including 210 on national highways. Friday 7 June 2013

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/india/19-die-as-bus-rolls-into-gorge-in-himachal-1.1194064

Over 181 lives lost in Victoria Day disaster of 1881

For the past few weeks we have been looking at the terrible tragedy that occurred on May 24, 1881 in the usually placid waters of the Thames River between downtown London and Springbank Park.

Last week we were there when the over loaded paddle wheel excursion steamer the Victoria tipped over in the Thames and the upper deck crashed onto the lower deck and the boat sank in 17 feet of water in a remarkably short period of time.

Some survivors managed to escape the horror and make it to shore and then returned to the waters to help pull bodies from beneath the wreckage and place them on board another excursion steamer. The Princess Louise had quickly transformed itself from a boat of pleasure to a morgue.

Many of the bodies brought ashore showed terrible signs of the terrible struggles, open wounds that were bleeding profusely. Many of the faces were terribly disfigured while others in death showed the terror on their faces.

The late afternoon was quickly filled with heroic actions in brave attempts to save others. Stories about the immediate aftermath of the sinking abound and many were saved due to superhuman efforts on the part of fellow passengers and passersby. However, there were other tales to be told as well.

Many of the bodies were not identified properly causing much grief to people when they were told of the loss of a loved one, only to discover that the rescuers had made an error in identification. And so the stories went on, each as terrifying and bizarre as the next one. Entire families were wiped out and people watched in horror as loved ones died before their eyes.

Between the hours of 8-9 p.m. the Thames gave up one victim almost every minute. In that hour 59 bodies were retrieved. By 10 p.m., 152 lifeless bodies had been taken from the muddy waters.

As darkness closed in, bonfires were lit to assist rescuers in their gruesome task and in a mistaken interpretation one European newspaper drew sketches that indicated the bodies taken from the Thames were for some odd health reason being burnt on the spot!

Thieves, as in any other time past or present, also worked through the night stealing watches, jewelry or money when the overworked police officers were not looking.

Hearses, carriages for hire and wagons were in short supply as were the drivers. Many of them charged exorbitant prices and one driver in a hurry to carry even more corpses took a body to its home, found no one there and decided to open a window and gently slide the corpse through the window onto the floor and then he quickly returned for another gruesome load. Another driver left a lifeless body sitting up in a chair in the family home with only a brief hastily scribbled note.

Funerals went on for a full week and a general pall of gloom hung over the city. In London South, on one city block, five funerals were held from six homes. In total it is believed that at least 181 people lost their lives that day in the tranquil waters of the Thames.

By Aug. 8, the hulk of the Victoria which had remained not far from her dock for over two months was finally dismantled before the winter set in. The machinery and boiler were sold for scrap and no one in London wanted any reminders of a pleasure craft that, on a glorious May morning a short time before, so many had wanted to clamor on board and celebrate a time that seemed so full of life, promise and joy.

How quickly life can change from absolute joy to utter despair. Such was life in 1881 and such is life today.

Friday 7 June 2013

http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/2013/06/07/over-181-lives-lost-in-victoria-day-disaster-of-1881