DNA tests identify 10 more Rana Plaza victims

The National Forensic DNA Profiling Laboratory has identified ten more Rana Plaza victims who were buried without identification, officials said.

With the latest detection, the number of victims identified through DNA test rose to 210, causing a matter of little hope for the relatives who are yet to find out their beloved ones following the country's worst ever industrial disaster.

The DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) test came to spotlight few weeks after the multi-storied building collapse when the authorities concerned were not in a position to identify the trapped bodies as those were too decomposed.

They said the forensic lab of the Dhaka Medical College (DMC) has finished all necessary works on the samples collected from ten undetected victims and started preparing a complete report of the DNA profiling tests.

"We are hopeful of submitting the test report to the Ministry of Labour and Employment in the upcoming week," said Prof Sharif Akhteruzzaman, National Technical Adviser (NTA) of the DMC Forensic Lab.

Declining to disclose any further information regarding the issue, the professor said they have almost completed the DNA matching process. "But some minor works still remain incomplete," he added.

Another official at the Lab said relatives of the victims can claim compensation to the authority after successful completion of the DNA-matching process.

He said that the number of bodies identified through DNA now stands at 210 as the laboratory earlier delivered complete DNA report of 200 bodies to the ministry.

However, the authorities are yet to make any progress in respect of 112 bodies, whose collected samples are not matched yet.

Although a total of 548 DNA samples from victims' relatives were submitted to the laboratory against the 322 unidentified bodies, unfortunately 112 victims' DNA test did not match with any submitted samples.

Professor Akhteruzzaman said the DNA testing laboratory found mismatch with the collected samples and the samples given by the victims' relatives. For instance, the four bodies from which DNA had been collected for lab tests were taken and buried by people claiming to be the victims' relatives, without going through any test procedure. But later on three out of the four matched with the samples given by others, he added. Professor Akhteruzzaman expressed dissatisfaction at the process of handing over 800 bodies to relatives after the building collapse without having any DNA samples kept from either the victims or the relatives.

He, however, did not give up the hope regarding the identification of the remaining 112 bodies saying that certainly there is a way to detect them. But the procedure is very complex and without support from the government it is not possible to accomplish, he said.

"To identify rest of the bodies, we have to examine the DNA samples from all the relatives of the Rana Plaza victims who were buried without DNA tests", the professor added. He said the work is not simple as the victims' family members have already received some compensations, even in many cases they won't allow further tests.

"However, if the government takes effective measures with financial support for the large-scale testing procedures for the buried bodies it would be possible to make identification," he stated.

Shock gripped people all over the world on April 24 last year when the 9-storey commercial building that housed five apparel units collapsed within seconds at Savar, killing at least 1130 people and injuring hundreds others.

Friday 28 March 2014

http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/2014/03/28/25789

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South Korea returns bodies of hundreds of Chinese soldiers

South Korea on Friday repatriated the remains of 437 Chinese soldiers killed during the Korean War six decades ago, making a gesture symbolic of warming ties between the two nations.

China sent a flood of soldiers to help its Communist ally North Korea, which invaded South Korea in June 1950. Its intervention saved the North, whose forces had been pushed back toward the country’s northern corner by American-led United Nations forces later that year. The three-year war ended in a cease-fire, leaving the divided Korean Peninsula technically in a state of war.

Over the years, when South Korea discovered the remains of hundreds of Communist soldiers in old battle sites, it kept them in a tucked-away, little-known temporary burial ground north of Seoul, until recently known as “the enemy cemetery.”

That it took six decades for the bodies of the fallen Chinese soldiers to return home bore testimony to political uneasiness rooted in a war that, while it long ago ended, was never formally put to rest.

Between 1981 and 1989, North Korea accepted the remains of 42 Chinese soldiers from South Korea and handed them over to Beijing. But it has never been willing to negotiate for the return of its own fallen soldiers. Accepting their return home would be seen as a gesture of closing the war, which North Korea insists will not be over until Washington signs a peace treaty with it.

After accepting the remains of another Chinese soldier in 1997, North Korea refused to accept any more, leaving the 437 Chinese soldiers stranded in the inter-Korean deadlock.

A breakthrough came last June when President Park Geun-hye of South Korea visited China to cultivate warmer ties with China. She offered to send the Chinese remains home as a good-will gesture, and Beijing welcomed it.

“The repatriation today will be a landmark for the two countries in healing the trauma from the past and moving toward coprosperity,” Vice Defense Minister Baek Seung-joo of South Korea said during a ceremony held at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul.

During the ceremony, the Chinese ambassador, Qiu Guohong, placed Chinese flags on dark brown boxes that contained the remains. Chinese soldiers carried them aboard a Chinese plane, which flew them to the Resist America and Aid Korea Martyrs Cemetery, the resting place for China’s Korean War dead, located in Shenyang, in northeastern China.

China remains North Korea’s last remaining major ally, while the United States is South Korea’s No. 1 military ally. But China has overtaken the United States as South Korea’s biggest trading partner since it normalized relations with Seoul in 1992. Each year, millions of Chinese visit South Korea as tourists.

Still, the existence of Chinese remains, and the “enemy cemetery” itself, has drawn little attention in South Korea, even though some Chinese tourists began visiting it in recent years. Built on a hillside, it is difficult to find.

Now with their Chinese companions gone, the remains of 770 North Korean soldiers stay marooned in the cemetery only a few miles south of the inter-Korean border, their forlorn grave markers emblematic of unresolved Cold War hostilities that still divide the Koreas. Their graves all face north, looking homeward, in contrast to the Korean tradition of aligning graves toward the south.

Also buried there are dozens of postwar North Korean agents, including commandos killed in an unsuccessful 1968 attack on the presidential palace in Seoul and a North Korean agent who killed himself after planting a bomb on a South Korean jetliner that exploded over Myanmar in 1987 with 115 people aboard.

The bodies of the agents cannot go home because their government has not acknowledged their missions.

Estimates of the number of Chinese killed in the war vary from 110,000 to over 400,000.

South Korea said it would continue to repatriate Chinese remains if it discovered more while excavating battle sites for its own war dead.

Friday 28 March 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/south-korea-returns-bodies-of-hundreds-of-chinese-soldiers.html?_r=0

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