Tuesday 1 October 2013

23 killed in Thailand's floods as more storms loom


Thai authorities say floods have killed more than 20 people and affected areas across the country in the past two weeks, while concern is growing there could be a repeat of the devastating floods in 2011.

The Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department says 32 out of 77 provinces have seen flooding since mid-September and 23 people have been killed.

Deputy Prime Minister Plodprasop Suraswadi says Thailand is not at risk from the remnants of Typhoon Wutip, which reached the northeast Tuesday. However, he says the country should be ready for other storms.

In 2011, Thailand saw its worst flooding in half a century. More than 800 people were killed and agricultural, industrial and residential lands were devastated over a wide swathe of the country.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11133104

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DNA test required to identify capsized boat victims


DNA tests were required to identify the bodies retrieved after a vessel carrying Lebanese and other migrants to Australia sank off the coast of Indonesia last week, a Lebanese envoy to Jakarta told The Daily Star Monday.

“I examined 33 bodies today in the public hospital of Jakarta and I couldn’t identify any. It is as if they were struck by an atomic bomb,” said Toufic Hamzeh, who was dispatched to Indonesia by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri and caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati to follow up on the issue.

“Relatives of the travelers should send DNA samples to the Lebanese Embassy here [Indonesia] so that DNA tests can be conducted to identify the bodies,” Hamzeh added.

Hamzeh said that he was informed by the Indonesian police that a remaining 25 bodies would be brought to the hospital Tuesday.

At least 26 Lebanese asylum-seekers drowned in the boat accident on Friday. They were attempting to illegally migrate to Australia. Indonesian police said there were 80 people aboard the boat that was headed for Australia’s Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. The Lebanese victims are mainly from Akkar and the northern city of Tripoli.

Hamzeh said that 18 Lebanese survived the accident. “I visited some of them who were put in a hotel by Indonesian authorities, far from Jakarta, at least six to seven hours by car,” he said. “We provided them with clothes and mobiles ... they cannot leave the hotel.”

“I heard about three Lebanese women who survived and are in hospital,” Hamzeh said, adding he was on his way to see them.

Hamzeh said that the process of bringing the Lebanese survivors back home would take from 10 to 15 days since they lacked legal documents.

He explained that there were some Lebanese who couldn’t make the trip and were arrested by Indonesian authorities for lacking documentation. “I will try to solve their problem to bring them back home,” Hamzeh said.

Survivors of the accident told journalists that they sent their GPS coordinates to Australian rescuers for assistance, but no one came to their aid.

Hundreds have died in fatal sinkings in recent years, as large numbers continue to board rickety, wooden boats in Indonesia to try and make the treacherous sea crossing to Australia.

Residents of Akkar blocked main roads Monday demanding that the fate of their relatives be uncovered.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2013/Oct-01/233128-dna-test-required-to-identify-capsized-boat-victims.ashx

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Investigator makes appeal over cases of Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac, Joe Lynskey and four other IRA victims


Time marches on but there are still people alive who must have knowledge about the seven disappeared whose bodies remain missing, says Geoff Knupfer, the English forensic scientist and chief investigator of the North-South Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.

He wishes they would come forward.

Mr Knupfer, who was involved in the 1980s in the searches for the victims of the Moors murderers, says at least six and up to 12 people would have participated in each abduction, killing and secret burial of the disappeared. “Just to think about,” he says. “There must have been between a dozen and half-a-dozen people involved. There would be a driver, guards, people who dug the graves, often there would be pilot [scout] cars as well . . . ”

How could there not be people out there who could end the torment of the families of the victims, he wonders. Ten bodies have been recovered but seven remain missing. Of the seven, the commission has no leads on Joe Lynskey, a man in his 40s who disappeared from west Belfast in 1972, nor on Capt Robert Nairac, shot dead just south of the Border in 1977. Both were killed by the IRA.

Former monk

Mr Lynskey was one of the first of the people know as the Disappeared to be killed but was one of the last to be known about. It was only three years ago that the IRA admitted he was one of these victims.

A former Cistercian monk, he was killed because, the IRA decided, he was seriously compromised due to an alleged relationship with the wife of an IRA prisoner. While the IRA admitted the killing in 2010, the commission still has not been able to persuade former members to provide details of where he is buried. Mr Knupfer was emphatic that the body of Capt Nairac – who was killed by the IRA in Ravensdale, Co Louth – was not destroyed, as has been reported and rumoured.

“We are absolutely confident that this story of his remains being put through a meat processing factory are just pure myth. We are happy that wasn’t the case,” he says. “We are confident he is buried south of the Border and that his remains are recoverable.”

South Armagh IRA members are notorious for their reluctance to yield up their secrets. Nonetheless, Mr Knupfer appealed to their humanity: “This is not about Robert Nairac, soldier, it is too late to help him; it is about his family who are grieving just like any other family would do.”

Information had been received on Seamus Ruddy, who was killed by the Irish National Liberation Army in Paris in 1985 due to an internal feud, but it appeared to be incorrect.

“A location was pointed out to us. We searched it and not only were we able to say Seamus Ruddy wasn’t there but that the ground had never been disturbed. The assumption we draw from that is it was the wrong place,” says Mr Knupfer.

‘First-hand knowledge’

The commission is convinced that Columba McVeigh, who went missing in 1975, is buried in Bragan bog in Co Monaghan, but despite several digs since 1999 his body has not been found. Mr Knupfer wants more specific information. “We believe there are other people out there who have first-hand knowledge, and we appeal for them to come forward,” he says.

The commission also believes Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright, who went missing from west Belfast in 1972, are buried in the bog at Coghalstown in Co Meath. But, again, finding more specific information is the problem. It has “high-grade information” that Brendan Megraw, who disappeared from Twinbrook in west Belfast in 1978, was buried in Oristown, Co Meath. There is a concern, however, that due to previous bulldozing his secret grave could have been destroyed, according to Mr Knupfer.

“We know in some cases there are people alive who we have not managed to speak to us yet; for whatever reason they won’t engage with the commission. It would be helpful to speak to people with primary knowledge,” he adds. Anyone with any information is guaranteed absolute immunity and anonymity, Mr Knupfer stresses.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/investigator-makes-appeal-over-cases-of-columba-mcveigh-robert-nairac-joe-lynskey-and-four-other-ira-victims-1.1545312

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Old atrocities, now official, galvanize Afghanistan


So many people were buried alive by bulldozers in the barren fields around the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison on Kabul’s outskirts that guilty soldiers later said it was like an earthquake as their victims tried to claw their way out.

Thirty-four years later, the names and details of nearly 5,000 of those victims — arrested, tortured and killed by the Afghan Communist government in 1978 and 1979 — have resurfaced, cataloged in records released in September.

The so-called death lists were originally compiled by the Afghan government. They languished, unreleased, for decades, until unearthed by Dutch investigators and published on the Web site of the Netherlands national prosecutor’s office.

The Afghan government’s reaction to the release of the lists was initially cautious, and President Hamid Karzai was quoted as saying that reconciliation was more important than prosecutions.

It is a sensitive issue in Afghanistan, and not just because so many former Communist officials now hold high positions in government, especially in the military and police hierarchies. Calls to prosecute old Communists inevitably lead to calls to prosecute all those who came after them and committed massacres of their own during the three decades of conflict that followed.

But as word spread among thousands of relatives of the victims, the death lists went viral, lighting up social media among a younger generation, and bringing calls from older people for prosecutions. Finally, pressed by Sima Samar, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, President Karzai declared Monday and Tuesday national days of mourning.

Mosques in Kabul and throughout the country were thronged with mourners for the victims on Monday, and many memorials were planned in rural villages that were particularly hard hit by the wave of torture and killings carried out by Afghanistan’s intelligence service at the time.

Just in the village of Gul Qala, in Kabul Province, 25 people were on the newly released lists. They were all relatives of Mualavi Abdul Aziz Mujahid, a former jihadi commander and a politician; they included uncles, cousins and in-laws.

At the time, Mr. Mujahid was 10 and knew little of the ferment around him, until he saw an older cousin, a religious scholar and a farmer named Shah Dahla, arrested by plainclothes agents.

Mr. Dahla had just returned from the muddy fields, barefoot, and the agents refused to allow him a moment to rinse off his feet and put his sandals on.

The memory reduces Mr. Mujahid to tears 34 years later.

“Over the years, I have seen a lot of dead bodies in a lot of battles,” he said. He later fought the Communist government, the Soviets and then other jihadis in the civil war, and finally the Taliban. “But this person’s innocence hurts me deeply.”

Mr. Dahla’s son, Mohammada Jan, said his mother and his siblings never fully accepted that their father was dead, though they suspected it. “Even so, when we found out from the Internet that it was confirmed, everyone cried,” he said. Mr. Jan was 15 at the time of his father’s disappearance; he, too, choked up at the memory of his being taken away unshod.

The death lists include victims’ names, dates of death, father’s name, occupation, hometown and the charges against them — usually reduced to one word, including “anarchist,” “fundamentalist,” “Maoist,” “Khomeini.”

The chain of events that led to the lists’ discovery began with an asylum request by Amanullah Osman, the head of interrogation for Afghan intelligence in 1978 and 1979, who fled to the Netherlands in 1993. In his asylum interview, according to the prosecutor’s office, Mr. Osman admitted to signing documents concerning people who were to be executed. “That was expected and desired of me,” he said. “If you don’t go along with it, you can never attain such a high position.”

The Dutch denied him asylum but never expelled him, and eventually opened up a war crimes investigation. That led them to a 93-year-old Afghan refugee in Germany who gave them the death lists, which she had gotten from a former United Nations official, Felix Ermacora, who had never released them. Dutch authorities said they were confident of the lists’ authenticity.

The prosecution was dropped in 2012 when Mr. Osman died, and the Dutch decided to release the lists. “The close relatives of the deceased in this case have the right to know the truth about the circumstances of the disappearance and the final fate of their loved ones,” the prosecutor’s office said.

The overwhelming public response in Afghanistan has forced the government to make some acknowledgment, said Ahmad Nader Nadery, a former member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the author of a still-unreleased report on mass graves throughout Afghanistan. But he added that the lists had stirred a fresh wave of concerns among officials.

“The government was afraid as always that this was the beginning of a process, and it will not stop just in this era of the Communists,” Mr. Nadery said. “Those in the government were also involved in the ’90s, and the Taliban also committed similar atrocities.”

One particular target of popular anger is Assadullah Sarwari, Mr. Osman’s boss at the Afghan intelligence agency in 1979, who was initially sentenced to death but later had his sentence reduced to a 19-year prison term.

Shalizai Didar, a former governor of Kunar Province, said 11 people from his family were on the lists, along with 100 people he knows. “We demand from the government to execute Assadullah Sarwari — not only him but also his colleagues.”

“They should all be prosecuted, no exceptions,” he said. “In the name of democracy, Taqat and all those people are just walking free.”

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/world/middleeast/release-of-decades-old-death-lists-stirs-anger-and-grief-in-afghanistan.html?_r=0

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Floods kill at least 30 in Cambodia, thousands have to flee


At least 30 people in Cambodia have died in recent floods caused by heavy rains and the Mekong River overflowing its banks, a disaster relief official said Monday, Sept 30, according to the Associated Press.

Keo Vy of Cambodia's disaster management committee the floods have also forced more than 9,000 families to flee their homes and destroyed nearly 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of rice fields.

He added that nearly 67,000 houses were damaged or submerged, as well as 513 schools, 300 Buddhist pagodas and 25 health centers. Nine of the country's 24 provinces have been affected so far, he said.

Four people died Sunday night when their car drove into a flooded pond in the eastern province of Prey Veng, police said.

The government warned that the rains will continue as Typhoon Wutip headed toward neighboring Vietnam late Monday.

Tens of thousands of people were being evacuated from high-risk areas in central Vietnam, as typhoon Wutip that sank at least two Chinese fishing ships neared the coast. A total of 75 fishermen are missing after three vessels encountered strong winds near the Paracel Islands, according to a statement on the website of the Hainan government in south China. Two of the vessels sank Sunday and contact with the third has been lost, it said. Typhoon Wutip was expected to hit the central coast later Monday with sustained winds of up to 93 miles per hour and gusts up to 125 mph, Vietnam’s weather forecaster said.

Fatalities and dislocations caused by floods are an annual problem for Cambodia at this time of year. About 250 people were killed in 2011 in the worst flooding in a decade, according to the government.

This year's flooding death toll already has exceeded the 14 people reported killed by flooding in the relatively dry year of 2012.

Last week, typhoon Usagi killed at least 25 people in Guangdong province of south China. Winds of up to 180 km/h (110 mph) were recorded in some areas, toppling trees and blowing cars off roads. Its victims drowned or were hit by debris. The storm has affected 3.5 million people on the Chinese mainland.

Earlier in the month, Mexican authorities say 97 people were killed by storms that hit the country. In the village of La Pintada, near the Pacific coast, a landslide partially engulfed the town. At least 15 bodies have been recovered and almost 70 residents were missing. More than 100,000 people were affected.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/170645/

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Australia's police DNA database expands to cover disasters


Police investigators across Australia will soon have better access to the federal government’s national DNA database through a powerful new search engine that will allow detectives to match the genetic material of unidentified human remains at crime scenes and disaster sites and establish a possible family connection between individuals.

A tender issued by CrimTrac, which is responsible for developing and maintaining national information sharing services between the state, territory and federal law enforcement jurisdictions, reveals the agency is looking for a supplier to help police forensic labs extend their ability to find genetic matches.

As part of its service to other agencies, CrimTrac hosts the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database (NCIDD), which enables Australian police and authorised bodies to directly match DNA profiles nationally by comparing two DNA profiles to determine if they come from the same person.

Although sometimes controversial, DNA matching is widely regarded as the most significant leap in the forensic science of identification since fingerprinting and because it provides investigators with evidence that is usually hard enough to lead to either a conviction or release of a person accused of a crime.

But aside from justice, DNA evidence can also offer closure.

CrimTrac now wants to expand on its existing DNA skillset by creating a National DNA Investigative Capability (NDIC) which can be used in not only for criminal investigations, but also for disaster victim identification (DVI) and identifying previously unknown human remains.

CrimTrac calls it “kinship matching”, which examines profiles to “establish biological relationships among individuals” and is an approach that will be used in the identification of unidentified human remains across Australia.

If all other investigative leads have been exhausted, investigators will be able to do a search of the national database for potential relatives of the remains using a ‘relative’ index on the national database.

The grim process of identifying human remains at disaster sites like plane crashes or bomb blasts has always been a challenge for investigators because of the risk of misidentifying an individual - making DNA testing an invaluable tool in the absence of fingerprinting or dental record availability.

Testing processes for DNA identification have become easier for investigators through quick acting devices like the DNAscan technology from General Electric, launched in early September 2013.

The gadget is a printer-sized device that claims to reduce DNA identification from a matter of hours to only 85 minutes.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://www.governmentnews.com.au/2013/10/01/article/Australias-police-DNA-database-expands-to-cover-disasters/RGRMCICRXJ

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14 fishermen rescued, 2 dead, 58 missing after Typhoon Wutip


Rescuers Tuesday found 14 fishermen alive, retrieved two bodies and are continuing search for 58 others missing in the South China Sea after three fishing boats have sunk since Sunday afternoon due to Typhoon Wutip.

A total of 88 fishermen and their boats, all from south China's Guangdong Province, went missing near Shanhu Island of the Xisha Islands, about 330 km from China's island province of Hainan.

Fourteen survivors were rescued Monday.

Zhang Jie, a spokesman with the Hainan Maritime Affairs Bureau, said 22 vessels and four airplanes are still combing the sea area for more survivors.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90882/8415550.html

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