Florida to exhume bodies buried at former boys school

This weekend, Florida will begin digging into its tragic past as anthropologists start unearthing what they believe are the remains of dozens of children buried on the grounds of a former reform school.

The exhumations at the Dozier School for Boys -- which closed in 2011 -- are the culmination of years of controversy surrounding the reform school and a mythology that has taken on a life of its own.

Rightly or wrongly, the Florida Panhandle town of Marianna -- just west of Tallahassee -- has become synonymous with the school and its dark past.

Some of those who were once sent to Dozier -- now senior citizens -- have come forward with stories of abuse at the school, including alleged beatings, torture, sexual abuse, killings and the disappearance of students, during the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

On the school grounds buried deep in the woods lies a small unkept patch of land with 31 white crosses. Rusting away with time, they mark the final resting place for the unknown students that the state has confirmed were buried there.

Nearly 100 children died while at the school, according to state and school records, many as a result of a tragic dormitory fire in 1914 and a deadly flu epidemic in 1918.

The poorly-kept state records cannot account for what happened to 22 children who died at the school. And, no one knows who is buried where.

"They were poor kids and a lot of times, people never came to visit them," said Elmore Bryant, a lifelong Marianna resident and head of the NAACP in Jackson County, Florida, which includes Marianna.

"Even when they were dismissed, they got home, their family had moved. So, who was going to pay attention if something happened to them while they was at Dozier?"

Some believe the bodies are African-Americans, disposed of by the Ku Klux Klan. This gravesite is in what was traditionally known as the "black side" of the reform school -- a reference to the era of segregation.

Many believe another cemetery exists on the sprawling, wooded, 1,400-acre property, but it has not been found.

Last year, a research team from the University of South Florida, on a humanitarian mission to help identify these bodies for surviving families, used ground-penetrating radar, and found that there are as many 19 more bodies buried in the surrounding area -- completely unmarked.

After clearing the area, the team determined that a total of 49 graves exist.

"These are children who came here and died, for one reason or another, and have just been lost in the woods," said Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist leading the USF team who once worked on an international forensics team that amassed evidence used in Yugoslavian war crimes trials.

She has lobbied for an exhumation of the remains because, as she put it, "When there's no knowledge and no information, then people will speculate and rumors will persist or questions remain."

Robert Staley spent about 10 months at the Dozier School for Boys between 1963 and 1964 for allegedly stealing a car.

He says he was taken to the "White House" on his very first day.

"I came out of their in shock, and when they hit you, you went down a foot into the bed, and so hard, I couldn't believe," said Straley. "I didn't know what they were hitting you with."

Years ago, Staley and several others who spent time at Dozier came forward with allegations that they were beaten with long leather slaps inside a small white concrete building, they forever call "the White House."

The men became known as the "White House Boys."

One former administrator, Troy Tidwell -- a one-armed man accused of abuse by several former students -- admitted that "spankings" took place, but denied that anyone was ever beaten or murdered.

Florida first started looking into the allegations in 2008, after some of the White House Boys -- who had met on the Internet and shared similar stories -- called on then-Gov. Charlie Crist to investigate.

At Crist's request, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched an investigation and its final report in 2009 accounted for 31 boys buried in the cemetery.

The investigation failed to clear up the mystery over what happened to the dozens of other students who died at the school whose bodies have never been accounted for.

FDLE closed the case due to lack of evidence that anyone had died as a result of criminal conduct. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice closed the school in 2011, 111 years after it first opened.

Then last year, forensic anthropologists from USF used their ground-penetrating radar to find what appeared to be 19 more remains than previously thought to have been buried on the school grounds.

That discovery along with pressure from the NAACP and high level officials, including Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Florida, led to action by the state. Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and his Cabinet voted to allow the USF forensics team to exhume the bodies, against the objections of Jackson County commissioners.

"There were children that disappeared that really were not accounted for, so I think that a new day has come here," said Wansley Walters, secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

"What we have now is an opportunity to really get down to the truth and also try to bring some healing to the victims and the families."

Owen's story

State records say one boy buried here is 14-year-old Owen Smith.

"He had no ambition to do anything but play music," said his sister Ovell Smith Krell, 84.

She says her older brother ran away from home in 1940 at age 14 to become a musician in Nashville, but never made it. Owen Smith was arrested in a stolen car, and sent to the reform school in Marianna.

He ran away from the school, but got caught, he wrote in a letter to 12-year-old Ovell a short time afterward.

A few months later, his family received a letter from the school, notifying them that Owen had run away for a second time.

"So far, we have been unable to get any information concerning his whereabouts," wrote Millard Davidson, the school's superintendent at the time. "We will appreciate your notifying us immediately if you receive any word from or concerning him."

Owen's family decided to travel to Marianna to find out what was going on, but just before leaving, there was a call from the school with word that Owen had been found dead.

"They think he crawled under a house to try and get warm and that he got pneumonia and died," said Krell.

She said her mother asked that Owen's body be taken to a funeral home. The family had to borrow a car for the trip and when they arrived in Marianna two days later, school officials allegedly told them that their son was already buried.

"They said that the body was so decomposed, you wouldn't be able to identify him ... they took him straight out to the school and buried him," she said.

Owen's classmate told the family a different story.

According to Krell, the boy said as he and Owen tried to escape, "my brother was running out across a field, an open field, and there was three men shooting at him, with rifles."

"I believe to this day, that they shot my brother that night, and I think they probably killed him and brought him back to the school and buried him," she said.

Closure, but criminal charges unlikely



Ovell Smith Krell, like other relatives of those believed to be buried at the school, is hoping the exhumations result in a sense of closure for her family.

Any remains that are exhumed will be taken to the University of South Florida in Tampa to be examined in an effort to reunite these lost boys with their families -- if possible.

Earlier this summer, DNA swabs were taken from a handful of surviving family members that have been found. If DNA can be matched to the bodies exhumed, these families want them to be buried properly in family plots.

"I would take him and put him down with my mom and dad in their cemetery," Krell said. "I hope I get that chance."

Whatever may be found in the exhumations of these long forgotten children, it's highly unlikely that anyone could ever be charged with any crimes.

"You have to have witnesses," said Glenn Hess, the state attorney of Jackson County, Florida. "Nobody can place a name with a homicide victim and a perpetrator."

And that's nearly impossible considering the amount of time that has passed.

"There are these general stories about the beatings and all that went on, but that's not unusual for reformatories in the '30s and '40s," he told CNN.

But this doesn't matter to Elmore Bryant, the NAACP leader. He's lived here all his life. He thinks the truth behind the mystery of Marianna will finally be found.

"I don't think the bones will lie. The bones will tell the truth," he said. "I'd want the truth to be known how I died."

Saturday 31 August 2013

ICMP: Missing persons issue deserves attention of whole world

The Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) issued a statement on Friday to mark August 30, the International Day of the Disappeared, saying that the issue of missing persons was one of the most important problems that should be addressed by all governments.

In the statement, ICMP Director General Kathryne Bomberger recalled the fact that about 40,000 people had gone missing during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s alone. Thanks to huge efforts that have been made, about 70 per cent of reported missing person cases have been resolved, but the remaining unresolved cases require equal attention, she said.

In addition to the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Peru, Argentina, East Timor and South Africa are countries that have made the greatest effort in prosecuting those responsible, and civil society is actively engaged and modern forensic methods, including DNA, are used.

"Today ICMP joins hundreds of thousands of families of missing persons from the countries of the Western Balkans, as well as Cyprus, Iraq, Spain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Nepal, Guatemala, India, Pakistan, Algeria, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Yemen, Somalia, South Africa and many other countries around the world in paying tribute to missing persons. In doing so, ICMP joins hundreds of thousands of families of missing persons in raising awareness about this global issue, whose resolution is not only important to provide a sense of closure for individual families of the missing, but for the implementation of the rule of law and the establishment of peace and justice," the statement said.

Saturday 31 August 2013

http://dalje.com/en-world/icmp--missing-persons-issue-deserves-attention-of-whole-world/481199

Ecuador’s missing persons

The type of missing person announcement you see here can be found at practically any bus stop or busy street in Quito. Friends from Cuba often ask me what has struck me the most about Ecuador so far. Well, there you go: its missing persons.

I had expected something else to make a deep impression in me, something like extreme poverty. I actually haven’t seen any of that yet, to the point that I dare say Cuba is poorer than Ecuador. What’s more, Quito is an extraordinarily beautiful city, a city of modern buildings nestled among immense volcanoes and mountains.

What has struck me the most about Ecuador is the number of missing person announcements one comes across. The missing are almost always young people (of both genders). It is said they are kidnapped by organ traffickers. It is also said that they are very rarely found.

Seeing the photo of a missing child is truly heartbreaking. Some days ago, authorities discovered a whole series of “de-homosexualizing” clinics, where some of the missing young people would end up, secretly sent there by their parents to be subjected to a medieval treatment aimed at making them give up their sinful ways (as though it worked that way).

What does the treatment consist of? Getting the kids out of bed at 4 in the morning, in the chilling cold of the Andes, and hosing them with cold water. Luckily, Ecuador’s Minister of Health is already devoting efforts to shut down these “institutions”, operating (needless to say) outside the bounds of the World Health Organization.

The photos of people who have gone missing for even worse reasons, however, continue to be posted. It is quite shocking. Ecuador strikes me as a safer country than its neighbors in the region, but it seems the worse can happen to you at any moment.

It is said a leading member of the opposition to President Correa, was implicated in these kidnappings and organ “business”. But the laws in Latin America were not made for the powerful, and no action has been taken.

There is always at least one photo of a missing person at every bus stop in Quito. Though I never know the person in the photo, I can’t help but imagine the pain their family feels, and to suffer over the tragedy that befalls these young people who end up as unwilling organ donors and lose their lives to this terrible business.

Saturday 31 August 2013

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=98447&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+havanatimes%2Fapge+(Havana+Times+Posts)

3D maps created in real time could aid disaster search and rescue

Highly detailed 3D maps of indoor and outdoor environments can now been created in real time with no drift thanks to a new mapping algorithm. The maps could be created in the immediate aftermath of a disaster to help search and rescue teams navigate and understand hazardous or unknown environments.

Researchers from MIT and the National University of Ireland used a low-cost Kinect camera to test the algorithm by filming environments and creating richly detailed 3D maps as they went. The camera recognises locations it's seen before and so when it returns to its starting point it forms a closed loop and stitches the images together.

Some of the scenarios in which this technology could be used in include "architecture and surveying-type operations, autonomous robotics settings and disaster management scenarios," Thomas Whelan, a PhD student at NUI, tells Wired.co.uk. "For example, areas of a building could be scanned in real-time by an architect to quickly design, visualise, and evaluate a renovation project. Or, a human operator could scan in parts of a building during a disaster scenario to evaluate the damage after an earthquake."

3D mapping is nothing new, but it has long suffered from a phenomenon known as "drift", which adds up all the small errors in the estimated path taken to create a disjointed map. To generate accurate maps, you have to know which of the millions of points need aligning. In the past this has been tackled by running the data over and over, but this isn't a practical approach to making maps in real time.

"Being able to map in real-time has a number of significant advantages, such as being able to perform decision making regarding the mapped area as it is being explored, which again is important for autonomous robotics and search and rescue type situations," says Whelan.

The new algorithm, however, keeps track of the camera's pose and positioning throughout its journey so that when it returns to the start point, it knows which adjustments to make. A Kinect camera takes images at 30 frames per second, which allows the algorithm to measure the camera's movements between each frame. It can then fix the points where walls and stairways don't meet and untangle the warped pathways, manipulating them so they accurately represent the space they've moved through.

"The density and fidelity of the maps enables the use of advanced object detection and semantic analysis techniques, providing very high level information about the area explored."

Maps of various indoor and outdoor locations in London, Sydney, Germany and Ireland, as well as in MIT itself, have been created using the technique. The team have made a video demonstrating the method which show maps being created and twisted into shape in real time.

The most exciting part of the work is probably the idea that autonomous robots could use the technology to help them make decisions about which direction to travel in and gain a deeper understanding of their environments, but it has the potential to be used in all sorts of situations.

"I have this dream of making a complete model of all of MIT," says Whelan's colleague John Leonard, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "With this 3D map, a potential applicant for the freshman class could sort of 'swim' through MIT like it's a big aquarium. There's still more work to do, but I think it's doable."

Saturday 31 August 2013

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/30/real-time-3d-mapping

The downing of Flight 007: 30 years later, a Cold War tragedy still seems surreal

The idea that Soviet fighter jets would shoot down a Boeing 747 airliner seems shockingly unbelievable. Two-hundred sixty-nine innocent people died in a largely forgotten Cold War attack that took place exactly 30 years ago this weekend.

On a sultry August night in 1983 at New York's JFK airport, Alice Ephraimson-Abt, a brilliant, 23-year-old, blue-eyed blonde, was about to board Korean Air Lines Flight 007 for Seoul, South Korea, halfway around the world. For one last time, she held her father, New Jersey businessman Hans Ephraimson-Abt, before saying goodbye. "There were hugs and I-love-yous," her father, now 91, told CNN.

Alice -- who was excited about heading Beijing to teach English and study -- could have been a diplomat -- a contributor to peace, her father said. "Her death was a great loss to her generation."

The ramifications of the shoot-down of Flight 007 reverberated far beyond the lives lost. It sparked global outrage, conspiracy theories and an activist movement that continues today. It also joined a list of disturbing developments that made 1983 one of the scariest years of the Cold War. Not since 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis had the world teetered so close to the unthinkable, according to declassified documents released last May.

It seemed like each month brought with it new and troubling headlines.

President Ronald Reagan, in March, said the Soviet Union amounted to an "evil empire." A few weeks later Washington announced it was working on a new space-based weapon. The press dubbed it "Star Wars."

That October, on the Caribbean island of Grenada, a coup and the deployment of pro-Soviet Cuban forces prompted the Pentagon to invade with thousands of troops. The following month the United States and NATO staged war games that depicted a nuclear attack scenario.

Fear seeped into TV, movies and music. In November, more than 100 million viewers tuned into ABC's nuclear attack drama, "The Day After." The following month, film crews began shooting "Red Dawn," about a Soviet invasion of America. Playlists on radio and MTV included "99 Luftballoons," a Cold War protest song.

But it was the downing of KAL 007 that opened many eyes to the Cold War's widening wave of darkness, its increasing uncertainty and its growing threat to peace.

Alice Ephraimson-Abt's flight made a refueling stop in Anchorage, Alaska, and -- following the tradition of the well-traveled family -- she phoned her father. She told him about a U.S. congressman, Rep. Larry McDonald, who also was aboard. One of 61 Americans on the plane, McDonald was a conservative Georgia Democrat and outspoken anti-communist.

What we know about the next five hours aboard Flight 007 comes from CNN interviews with ex-Soviet officials, the cockpit voice transcript and a 1993 report from the United Nation's International Civil Aviation Organization.

After the 747 took off for Seoul at 4 a.m. local time, the crew set their autopilot. What they apparently didn't know was, it was set to fail.

The plane began drifting off its intended course, and heading toward Soviet territory.

Hours later, passengers heard the familiar crew announcement, "Good morning ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing at Seoul Gimpo International Airport in about three hours. Local time in Seoul right now is 3 a.m. Before landing, we will be serving beverages and breakfast, thank you."

But sadly, there would be no landing.

Twenty-six minutes later, the captain was announcing an emergency decent and ordering crew to put on oxygen masks.

Fighter pilot: 'I had a job to do'

As it neared Soviet airspace, Flight 007 was being tracked at military installations. Soviet fighter pilots and their commanders knew they were being watched, too. U.S. spy planes patrolling the region created a constant state of tension, they said later.

American surveillance aircraft included Boeing RC-135s, the military version of a Boeing 707, which looked very much like a civilian airliner.

Packed with electronic surveillance gear, RC-135s often flew figure-eight patterns near passenger routes.

By this time Flight 007 had deviated more than 200 miles from its planned route.

Commanders at Dolinsk-Sokol airbase scrambled two Sukhoi Su-15 fighter jets and ordered them to intercept the airliner.

"I could see two rows of windows which were lit up," Soviet pilot, Col. Gennadi Osipovitch, told CNN in 1998, describing the 747's tell-tale double-deck configuration. "I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft -- military cargo planes don't have such windows."

"I wondered what kind of plane it was but I had no time to think," Osipovitch recalled. "I had a job to do. I started to signal to [the pilot] in international code. I informed him that he had violated our airspace. He did not respond." The Soviets fired warning shots with brightly-lit tracers, said Soviet Lt. Gen. Valentin Varennikov.

Inside KAL 007's cockpit, the flight crew appeared to be unaware of the Soviet fighters flying alongside. The pilot failed to react, the general said, and continued on course.

No attempt was made to contact the airliner via radio. The Soviet pilots failed to follow "ICAO standards and recommended practices related to the interception of civil aircraft," the ICAO report said.

Soviet command gave Osipovitch his instructions. "My orders were to destroy the intruder," Osipovitch remembered. "I fulfilled my mission."

When news of the shoot-down reached Washington and Moscow -- both reacted with outrage.

Reagan called the attack a "massacre" and a "crime against humanity" with "absolutely no justification -- legal or moral."

Soviet leader Yuri Andropov accused Washington of a despicable setup: a "sophisticated provocation masterminded by the U.S. special services with the use of a South Korean plane."

During the following months, Moscow cast a shroud of secrecy over the crash site off Sakahlin Island, never revealing whether it had found the plane's wreckage, flight data recorders, survivors or bodies. Victims' families were forced to grieve without burying their loved ones.

Unwilling to surrender, a handful of family members formed an advocacy group -- the first of its kind. Alice Ephraimson-Abt's father was among them.

As a kind of living memorial to Flight 007, Hans Ephraimson-Abt and his colleagues formed the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims, which pushed and worked with government bureaucrats around the world to learn all the details surrounding the disaster -- with limited success.

Then, something amazing happened: the Cold War ended.

Somehow, the world had made it through.

The breakup of the Soviet Union opened doors to KAL 007's data.

In 1992, during a top-level meeting in Moscow, Russia finally released the cockpit voice recorder transcript. It was 10 p.m. in a dimly lit meeting room of the Presidential Hotel when an interpreter for the U.S. ambassador translated the Russian transcript into English for Ephraimson-Abt and other delegates.

For the first time, Alice's father would know how his daughter and the 268 others had perished.

Slowly -- word-by-word -- he learned a terrible truth: the plane wasn't destroyed in the air.

Missile fragments "hit the back of the plane destroying three of its four hydraulic systems, severing some cables" and punching holes in the aircraft's walls, said Ephraimson-Apt, citing a Boeing report to the ICAO. "No perceptible cabin pressure was lost and all four engines continued to operate."

The damaged plane continued flying for 12 minutes -- spiraling toward the ocean below -- until it "crashed into the sea with most passengers smashed into pieces or drowning," Ephraimson-Apt said.

"That was -- emotionally -- a rather hard thing to take."

Questions breed suspicion

Thirty years later, almost all the important questions surrounding the crash have been answered, said Ephraimson-Abt. "What is not resolved is what happened to the bodies of our loved ones. The Russians to this day claim they haven't recovered any bodies."

So what happened to the bodies?

That simple question triggers intense debate among Flight 007 conspiracy theorists. Some believe the lack of bodies indicates that the Soviets somehow rescued Rep. McDonald and other passengers -- and then imprisoned them for years. That's the theory explored in the 2001 book, "Rescue 007," by Bert Schlossberg, a son-in-law of one of the victims. The book cites witnesses who reported seeing passengers housed in Siberian prisons.

"A lot of people wanted to believe that -- for their loved ones -- but I don't think there's any veracity to it," said attorney Juanita Madole, who represented 100 Flight 007 victims and their families for decades.

Another theory said the Soviets intentionally destroyed any bodies they found because they wanted to hide evidence of the incident. "That's just speculation," Madole said. "People like to speculate. It makes it more intriguing."

The whereabouts of the bodies of Flight 007 stands as a Cold War mystery that may never be entirely solved.

Pilot error

Overall, the ICAO said pilot error contributed to the disaster, despite the fact that the crew brought respectable experience to the flight. KAL 007 pilot Chun Byung In reportedly had logged 11 years operating civilian airliners. Before that he'd reportedly served as a stunt pilot in South Korea's Air Force.

Author Asaf Degani, a former NASA expert on cockpit information systems, says KAL 007's autopilot was probably in "heading" mode. That setting tells the plane to follow a course according to the magnetic compass -- which can vary in accuracy up to 15 degrees at high latitudes.

It was this autopilot mode that is believed to have put the plane into Soviet airspace. If the autopilot had been flying under the plane's highly accurate, computerized "INS" (inertial navigation system) setting, the 747 would have flown a different path, keeping it very close to -- but still out of -- Soviet airspace. The pilots, Degani suspects, may have mistakenly thought they were flying in INS mode.

"Chances are much less that this kind of confusion would happen now," says Degani, "because, by the turn of the century most commercial airliners flying intercontinental routs had display systems that show which autopilot mode -- 'heading' or 'INS' -- is actually flying the airplane.

"Unfortunately," said Degani, "These design changes came too late to help the crew and passengers of Flight 007."

Tensions rise and fall

International military tensions have continued to rise and fall since 1983 -- putting civilian airline passengers at various levels of risk.

In the volatile Persian Gulf -- just five years after Flight 007 -- the USS Vincennes shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300 flying from Teheran to Dubai. The Navy mistakenly ID'd the airliner as an attacking fighter jet and fired on it, killing all 290 passengers and crew.

And although the Cold War is long over, tiffs between Washington and Moscow continue, even in 2013. "I think there's always been some tension in the U.S.-Russian relationship after the fall of the Soviet Union," Obama said August 9. "There's been cooperation in some areas; there's been competition in others."

As for Hans Ephraimson-Abt -- he and fellow family members have helped other families, nations and airlines form advocacy and support organizations after some of the worst plane crashes of the past 30 years. In 2000, many of these organizations around the world united under the international Air Crash Victims Families Group, which enjoys invited "observer" status at the ICAO, and stakeholder status at the European Union. And it all began as a handful of family members supporting each other during one of the scariest periods of the Nuclear Age.

Permanent memorials for KAL 007 include a small cemetery marker on Russia's Sakahlin Island, and a 90-foot tower in Wakkanai, Japan, where some remains and personal effects that washed ashore in 1983 are kept. The tower consists of 269 white stones and two black marble slabs inscribed with the names of passengers and crew.

Memorial services at Wakkanai will mark this weekend's anniversary. But Ephraimson-Abt won't be there.

Instead, he expects to remain at home in Ridgewood, chatting by phone with fellow KAL 007 family members who've supported each other through the years.

"We all know what we remember -- so not many words have to be said," he acknowledges. "We're beyond consoling each other. But we never forget that each year there is a date when we particularly remember our love ones."

Saturday 31 August 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/31/us/kal-fight-007-anniversary/

Ombudsman calls for Agency to identify disappeared during terrorism years

Peru’s ombudsman has called for the government to create an agency responsible for finding those who were reported missing during the country’s internal conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, state news agency Andina reported.

Eduardo Vega, the head of the Defensoria del Pueblo, said that finding the individuals is a “humanitarian task” that the government should complete.

“We need, and this is an appeal, to create an entity in charge of looking for disappeared people, with resources, equipment, and through this work that I would like to call a humanitarian task, recover their remains and hand them over to family members,” Vega said.

Vega added that the internal conflict has left “a wound that hasn’t yet been healed” in Peru, as many families still do not know what happened to the remains of their loved ones.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, CVR, in its 2003 report initially listed 8,558 people as missing and included a register of 4,644 burial sites to exhume. However, by 2011 forensic specialists at the Legal Medicine Institute concluded that more than 15,000 disappeared during the 1980-2000 conflict and that there are more than 6,400 mass burial sites. In 500 exhumations carried out to date, 2,478 bodies have been recovered, of which 60% have been identified and 53% have been returned to their relatives for burial.

Next week, starting Sept. 3, forensic specialists will begin exhuming bodies at a mass grave in an area in the La Mar province of Ayacucho known as Oreja de Perro (Dog’s Ear), where 204 bodies of villagers killed by Shining Path rebels were buried. Meanwhile in the Ayacucho capital of Huamanga, when there are sufficient resources, investigations continue at the Los Cabitos military barracks —in investigations during 2005, 2007 and 2009, forensic specialists found 50 bodies and the partial remains of another 50, as well as four ovens, one with human remains, thus confirming the systematic torture, murder and disappearance of local villagers by military personnel during the conflict.

Forensic investigations are to be made on several other military barracks, when the Legal Medicine Institute is given the financial resources.

Almost 70,000 people were killed during the conflict between the Maoist-inspired Shining Path rebels and state security forces, according to the final report issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The large majority of the people killed during the conflict were poor, indigenous people were caught in the middle of the conflict between the Shining Path and the state.

Friday 31 August 2013

http://www.peruviantimes.com/30/ombudsman-calls-for-agency-to-indentify-disappeared-during-terrorism-years/20099/