The eerie case of 1977's Flight 653

Thirty-seven years ago, a Malaysia Airlines jet was hijacked and the ensuing crash, presumably due to a fight between the plane's crew and a terrorist, was so violent no intact bodies were ever found.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 653 had departed Penang, Malaysia on its way to Kuala Lumpur on a Sunday morning. As the plane descended, a lone terrorist believed to be a member of the Japanese Red Army, a militant communist group, hijacked the Boeing 737. The crew immediately reported the hijacking to air traffic controllers.

According to reports from the Aviation Safety Network, the hijacker demanded to be flown to Singapore. While exactly what happened next isn't clear, it's believed the hijacker shot both pilots and then himself en route to Singapore, presumably during a fight.

"The cockpit voice recordings indicate noises suggestive of the cockpit door being broken in, along with a reasonable amount of screaming and cursing. No noises are heard from within the cockpit to indicate any of the three occupants were conscious. The autopilot was then disconnected, possibly due to a pitch input by someone entering the cockpit and trying to control the aircraft. An investigator speculated that someone pulled back on the column, causing a pitch up, followed by an oscillation," and rapid dive, Aviation Safety Network reports.



It was around this time the plane fell off radar screens and all efforts to reestablish radio contract failed.

Later, a crash was reported by villagers near a Malaysian swamp. Rescue personnel at the swamp found a horrific scene of charred debris and bodies and experts later said the plane hit the ground at a near vertical angle.

All 100 people on board were killed; the collision was so violent no intact bodies were found.

All recovered remains were x-rayed in an attempt to discover evidence of a projectile or weapon. No weapon or bullet was ever found.

The victims' remains were later interred in a mass burial and a memorial was placed at the site.

The Japanese Red Army never claimed responsibility for the crash and conspiracy theories over what really happened abounded.

Sunday 16 March 2014

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2014/03/all_on_hijacked_malaysian_jet.html

Forensics expert says Yolanda death toll could reach 18,000

More than 18,000 lives may have been lost during typhoon “Yolanda,” according to forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun of the University of the Philippines Manila.

“The casualties could surpass that of Fukushima which claimed 18,000 lives,” she said.

“Yolanda claimed over 18,000, probably tens of thousands,” she told Malaya Business Insight. “That’s my gut feeling.”

The victims “may have died in whole families, meaning, nobody was left to report the missing and the dead,” she said in a scientific conference on emergency health management convened by the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development, Department of Science and Technology.

The running official record stands at some 6,200 dead and at least 1,000 missing. The toll could surpass that from the magnitude 9 earthquake off Fukushima in Japan in March 2011, which claimed some 18,000 lives.

“If you ask me, Yolanda claimed more,” Fortun said. “In disasters, you can’t recover all.”

Fortun was in Tacloban when the typhoon hit in November last year. She brought what order she could in the identification and proper burial of fatalities.

As a forensic pathologist, Fortun is a medical doctor trained to perform autopsies and postmortem examinations to determine cause of death.

Fortun knows what she speaks of. She was at the Ozone Disco Club in Quezon City after it was razed by fire before midnight in March 1996. The fire claimed at least 162 lives, the worst fire in Philippine history and among the 10 worst nightclub fires in the world.

Fortun was also at an orphanage in Manila after it was hit by a fire in December 1998, killing 29 children. And she was in Payatas, Quezon City, in July 2000 shortly after a mountain of trash buried more than 300 people alive in a landslide.

So, has forensic pathology improved since? “Yes, we now have body bags; that’s about it,” Fortun said.

In Yolanda’s wake, the problems were just too “enormous” in the confusion that followed. Fortun was able to bring some order to the burial of body bags so that, when future identification is required, individual graves can be traced.

In Tacloban, together with a physician and three morticians, Fortun opened body bags one by one, systematically tagging them. It was Day 2 and decomposition was starting.

“I don’t think there was a systematic gathering of the dead, they were picking up bodies as they found them,” she said.

She showed photos to physicians who attended her lecture on disaster victim identification. “Remember, this is minus the stench.”

EVERYTHING EXCEPT AN ID

She said there were a lot of wallets containing money, SIM cards and many other things – except identification cards. “If you’re anticipating a disaster, carry an ID.” Her team found a lot of cellphones and these will be useful as they can be traced, she said.

And “the bodies kept coming,” said Fortun as she gave an overview of where current forensic science is. “The Philippines has no death investigation system,” she said simply.

That’s the bad news, she said. The good news was, “we knew Yolanda was coming. I was already counting bodies in my mind,” she said. “And we can now do DNA identification.”

“In a disaster, it’s critical that you have pre-planning. You must have provisions for the collection, accommodation, examination and disposal of the dead in large numbers,” she said.

Mass disaster management is a health issue, she said, and should be handled by the Department of Health and not by the National Bureau of Investigation or the police.

‘PROPER CLOSURE’

The number one forensic issue is the identification of the victims, she said, and law enforcers do not have the capability to establish the fact of death, identify the deceased, and determine the cause and manner of death. “They are not capable of handling mass identification.”

She said it is necessary to investigate deaths so that victims are declared legally dead and bodies officially released. This way, the surviving spouse, for example, can remarry or heirs can get the inheritance. And if the deceased has a criminal case, it becomes moot and academic.

“It is most important that DNA analysis provides proper closure for relatives of the dead, especially when emotions are high as in disasters,” said Dr. Maria Corazon A. De Ungria who heads the DNA Analysis Laboratory at the Natural Sciences Research Institute, UP Diliman.

The PCHRD is funding the laboratory’s two-year study – “Human DNA Forensic Analysis Procedures for Human Remains Identification” – that started January last year. Another two-year research funded by the PCHRD is the Human DNA Forensics Program to develop DNA procedures that would be useful in the formulation of a national forensics strategy.

Sunday 16 March 2014

http://www.malaya.com.ph/business-news/news/forensics-expert-says-yolanda-death-toll-could-reach-18000

Six dead, six missing in Colombian torrential rain

At least six people have died, four were injured, six went missing and widespread material damage was inflicted by the torrential rains falling across a large part of Colombia, officials said.

The national emergency management service UNGRD said the count of victims is based on reports from seven provinces since Wednesday, the day when the rainy season began in this country, according to meteorologists.

Three of the fatalities were in Palmira and Cali in the southwestern province of Valle del Cauca, another was in Palermo in the southern province of Huila, and two were in Bucaramanga, capital of the northeastern province of Santander, where this Friday the bodies of two members of a family of four were recovered after their home was buried under a mudslide.

The other two mudslide victims in Bucaramanga’s 12 de Octubre neighborhood are still missing, as are another four people in Valle del Cauca.

UNGRD said that in Colombian territory, 17 emergencies have been reported, “including the avalanches, mudslides, high winds, storms, cresting rivers and floods” that have hit 16 municipalities, chiefly in the provinces of Huila, Santander, Valle del Cauca and Cundinamarca.

Besides the dead, injured and missing, the downpours have affected 58 family homes, of which six were totally destroyed and 52 suffered significant damage.

The national director of UNGRD, Carlos Ivan Marquez, visited Friday the Bucaramanga area, where the mudslide occurred that buried the family of four, to supervise search-and-rescue operations.

Marquez traveled Saturday to Palmira, Valle del Cauca, to check on the emergency situation caused by another mudslide in which four people went missing.

Sunday 16 March 2014

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=1777691&CategoryId=12393

Ambiguous loss: Chinese families have death rituals disrupted by missing Malaysia flight

The vast majority of the 239 people on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were Chinese or ethnic Chinese, and for them, in a culture that treasures ancestors and the rituals surrounding the passage of life into death, the possibility that no bodies may be found is excruciating.

“It’s horrible, just horrible,” said Joy Chen, cultural icon and author of the popular Chinese-language book, “Do Not Marry Before 30,” who commutes between Los Angeles and her “second home” in Beijing.

“In Chinese culture, the living and dead are part of the same family,” said Chen, 44. “There is such a strong sense of family. You are separated from your ancestor, but they are still a part of you.”

International authorities still don't know exactly what happened to the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8, local time, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Conspiracy theories -– from terrorism to a potential hijacking or even pilot suicide –- have fueled the rumors as families wait for news.

Malaysia Airlines has said at least 152 of the passengers were Chinese. And their families are faced with the likelihood that centuries-old cultural traditions of funeral and burial will be disrupted.

Chen, who is Chinese-American, said that the holiday Quing Ming –- returning to “sweep the grave” of a family member -- is an important ritual that would be next to impossible without the presence of a body.

When Chen’s family moved from Maryland, they embarked on a complicated effort to disinter and move her decade-old deceased grandmother to the West Coast. They also moved her grandfather’s body from Taipei.

“My generation of the family thought, ‘Leave her alone,’ but my parents had joined me in the West and it was more difficult for them to do the sweeping of the grave,” she said. The family legally fought the State of Maryland, which claimed it was a public health hazard, and eventually had her grandmother cremated and flown to California. “She belonged to us, God rest her soul. It was pretty amazing.”

Not knowing where the plane is –- if it has landed in some remote location and passengers may have survived –- is equally disturbing in East and West.

“The hardest thing for human beings to deal with is the unknown,” said Ann Rosen Spector, a clinical psychologist from Philadelphia who specializes in grief. “If you look at science, religion or logic, it’s about explaining the unknown. We always want to complete the circle. It’s like a scab is ripped off every time another piece of information takes away the hope.”

“They don’t have any place to put their anger or pain and keep getting the hope that something else will happen, a miracle to undead the person," Spector said.

For Chinese families, the prospect of funerals without bodies is incomprehensible, according to Chen. “When person first dies it’s incredibly important to have a body,” she said. “You have a wake for a whole day or more. The body is cleaned and dressed up in their best clothes and all the friends and relatives come around to pay respects. Then after that, there is a funeral procession and everyone goes to the grave site.”

In China, grieving families even hire professional wailers to join in the funeral procession. At the grave, families burn paper money so their dead family member has money to spend in the afterlife.

“That’s why it is so horrible,” she said of not having a body to bury. “Because in Chinese tradition, death is not just the end of a person’s life, they are going to another world and the family continues to maintain our relations with our ancestors. We live among them all the time and even seek their help.”

The Malaysia Airlines incident increases a sense of disruption and insecurity. “There is no sense of certainty,” said Chen. “You haven’t had the opportunity to pay respects from the passing of this world to the world of the dead. You don’t get to acknowledge and respect their passage into the afterlife.”

Sunday 16 March 2014

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/chinese-families-death-rituals-disrupted-missing-malaysia-flight/story?id=22919995&singlePage=true