Turkey mine explosion: Final bodies recovered from underground as death tolls reaches 301

Rescue workers removed the last remaining bodies from a stricken mine here on Saturday afternoon as the death toll in Turkey’s worst mining accident rose to 301 people, according to the prime minister’s office.

The final recovery efforts were hampered by a fire that broke out underground Saturday morning, as well as the leakage of methane gas, according to the energy minister, Taner Yildiz. Some of the 17 bodies removed overnight were so badly burned that DNA testing will be required to identify them, he said.

Smoke could be seen rising near an entrance to the mine on Saturday. For the first time since the accident four days ago, there were no relatives of victims seen waiting. Some of the families moved to a nearby state hospital, to await the results of the DNA tests.

With so many dead, the tragedy rippled for miles around the coal mine, affecting towns and tiny villages in a region where thousands of men work in the industry.

On Saturday, volunteers flocked to a village especially hard hit by the accident. At least 11 men from Elmadere, a town of about 250 people, were killed in the accident.

As the volunteers — who came in buses from Istanbul and other towns — passed out toys and candy to the village’s children, residents fretted about a future without their miners.

“We’ve tried cattle breeding, it failed. We tried tobacco, it failed,” said Ali Suay, 57, whose 34-year-old son died in the mine. “Nothing provided us enough income.”

At the entrance to the mine, Cevat Altuntas, who had worked as a miner for 30 years, said the authorities focused on safety only after accidents.

“This is how mining goes in Turkey,” he said. “Unless our fingers are bleeding, we don’t take precautions.”

Ozgur Ozel, an opposition politician from the Soma region, petitioned parliament in October to hold an inquiry into mine safety but the proposal was voted down.

He says there is a mine accident every three or four months in the area and 11 workers had died in the last three years alone.

The Turkish Government has not adopted the International Labour Organisation's convention on mine safety, which is widely regarded as the industry standard.

Saturday 17 May 2014

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-mine-explosion-final-bodies-recovered-from-underground-9390053.html

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Serbia and Bosnia floods: At least 20 dead

Record flooding in the Balkans has killed 20 people in Serbia and Bosnia this morning. Emergency services pulled dead bodies from flooded homes as tens of thousands were forced to flee, authorities said.

Soldiers worked to free hundreds of people blocked inside a school in Serbia, due to what meteorologists say is the worst flooding since records began 120 years ago, after three-months’ worth of rain fell on the region in just three days.

Obrenovac, 18 miles south-west of the Serbian capital Belgrade, is the worst hit, with water depth reaching up to three metres in the streets, and seven dead bodies found.

The city is completely underwater and residents reportedly stood on roofs and terraces waiting to be rescued. The main priority for the Serbian army was to evacuate 700 people, mainly women and children, from a primary school located on higher ground.

Thousands of volunteers joined the Serbian soldiers in building sandbag flood defences around the town of Sabac do to the flood danger presented by the river Sava.

In Serbia, 95,000 homes are without electricity right now, with the country’s energy system is near breaking point.

In Bosnia, 13 bodies have been found in the eastern town of Doboj and in Samac, in the north part of the country, during rescues this morning.

“I’m afraid that won’t be the end,” Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik told to a news conference held this morning in Belgrade, alongside with the Serbian authorities and Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian prime minister.

In the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina, 10,000 people are being evacuated and accommodated in schools. Helicopters evacuated people from the north Bosnian towns of Samac and Modrica and trucks are carrying food and blankets to the hardest hit areas.

About 1,000 people, including babies, pregnant women, disabled people and the elderly have been transferred in safe places from the region of Zeljezno Polje in central Bosnia, where several villages have been destroyed.

The flooding of the Kolubara, the Danube and the Sava rivers creates several problems to coal-fired power plants, causing a fire inside the Kolubara power complex, which has been closed since Thursday.

Saturday 17 May 2014

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/serbia-and-bosnia-floods-at-least-20-dead-in-worst-flooding-since-records-began-9390263.html

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Clyde Snow, famed forensic anthropologist dies; called “grave-digging detective”

Clyde Collins Snow, 86, one of the foremost of the nation’s forensic anthropologists, who discovered the hidden stories told by skeletal remains and put his findings in the service of human rights, bereaved families and law enforcement , died Friday in a hospital in Norman, Okla.

The death of Dr. Snow was confirmed by his wife, Jerry, who said he had cancer and emphysema.

As a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Snow was a medical detective, a kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes, who used keen observation, encyclopedic knowledge and a thorough n understanding of human experience to overcome what conventional wisdom describes as the silence of the grave.

In many of the most notorious crimes of the past half century, Dr. Snow made his energies and abilities available to those responding to the concerns of both grieving relatives and society at large: who had died, how they had died and who was responsible.

In a career that spanned continents and decades, he helped to give names to murder victims and to the persons whose remains were found after airplane crashes.

With decades of scientific knowledge in his head, and a leather satchel filled with specialized tools he helped to tell the story of Custer’s Last Stand, he confirmed the identity of X-rays taken after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and he refuted theories about the deaths of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In the aftermath of one event that marked the communal violence in the former Yugoslavia, he and his team determined that those whose bodies were found in a mass grave had been killed execution style.

It was not only the bones from which Dr. Snow could glean names and stories, it was also the very ground under which executioners in a variety of countries, tried to conceal their deadly acts.

“The ground is like a beautiful woman,” said the man who has been described as the country’s best known grave-digging detective. “If you treat her gently,” he continued in his folksy drawl, “she’ll tell you all her secrets.” In the appearance of soil on the surface, he could often infer what was hidden beneath.

Those secrets, which he worked to ferret out, included the deaths of tens of thousands of Mayan Indians who were liquidated 30 years ago in a bloody Guatemalan counterinsurgency program.

In an interview while there, he explained the passion that accounted for his years of trying to help dead men tell their tales. It was not mere scientific curiosity. It was a matter of law, justice and human rights.

“People will never respect the law until there’s justice,” he told The Washington Post. “And a good place to start is with murder” cases.

In another overseas mission, he was sent in 1985 by a scientific group to Argentina, where a “dirty war,” conducted under the rule of military juntas, had resulted in many people having mysteriously “disappeared.”

After leading a team that found the bodies of many death squad victims, he served as a witness at the trials of some of those accused of the killings.

There was a reason, he suggested, to sift through graves and scrutinize the skeletons of those long dead.

“If you can make people feel they’re not going to get away with it,” he said, “that’s all we’re asking.” It was, he said, to hold people accountable, even after time had covered up the evidence of wrongdoing.

“His first passion in life,” his wife said, “was human rights.”

Clyde Collins Snow, was born Jan 7, 1928 in Fort Worth, Tex. and grew up in the town of Ralls in the Texas panhandle. His father was a physician, and his mother, although not formally trained, served often as his nurse.

His bachelor of sciences degree came in 1951 from Eastern New Mexico University in Portales.

After graduate work and service as an Air Force officer, he began work for his PhD in archeology at the Unversity of Arizona, in Tucson. Shifting his focus to anthropology, he received his doctorate in 1967.

Even before receiving his PhD, however, he had been enlisted by the Federal Aviation Administration to help find ways to enhance the safety of airplane passengers in the event of a crash.

In 1979 he helped identify those killed in a fiery crash of an airliner shortly after it took off from O’Hare International Airport near Chicago.

Of the 273 who died, 50 were unidentified when he began work. X-rays, interviews with survivors, photographs and an effort to find such revealing signs as fractures, or indications of left-handedness, helped, along with use of a computer, helped him and a colleague give names to about one in five.

As his achievements and abilities became increasingly known, he was called on for such matters as the effort to identify remains found in a cemetery near Sao Paulo, Brazil.

It was suspected that the bones were those of Joseph Mengele, one of the most notorious of those who carried out Nazi concentration camp killings in World War II. Mengele had fled to South America; Dr. Snow helped show that the remains were his.

Among the techniques that he helped develop was that of facial reconstruction--creating a portrait of a human face from skull bones. Based on such work, the discovery of buried facial bones permitted drawings to be made that could be widely shown and could lead to identifications.

This technique has been credited with the identification of some of the 1970s victims of Illinois mass murderer John Wayne Gacy.

Another well known achievement was his participation on reconstructing the face of the ancient Egyptian king, Tutankhamen.

His work was regarded as pivotal in the decision by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences to make a formal specialty of forensic anthroplogy.

He retired from the FAA in 1979, performed consulting work and continued his teaching at the University of Oklahoma, where he was an adjunct faculty member at the time of his death.

In addition to his wife, he was survived by four daughters and one son. Three earlier marriages ended in divorce.

He was a witty man, not given to pretense. Once in Guatemala, he was asked about how he avoided troublesome confrontation with those who did not welcome his investigations.

He responded by drawing from a pocket a large metal badge, carrying the words “Illinois Coroners Association.”

Members of the civil patrols in Guatemala , who might have caused him difficulty, carried only small badges, he said. Despite its unimpressive words, his was of more than ample size, and with local law enforcement, he said, “whoever has the biggest badge wins.”

Saturday 17 May 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/clyde-snow-famed-forensic-anthropologist-dies-called-grave-digging-detective/2014/05/16/f93778a4-dd44-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html

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Desperate search after immigrants die in desert

Corina Montoya cries as she holds her granddaughter in her arms.

Angie will turn 2 soon. She was just 18 days old when her father left their home in El Progreso, Honduras. Hector Rivas hasn't been heard from since he headed to the United States in 2012 with the dream of buying a taxi, sending money home and giving his newborn a better life. Here, he only earned $304 a month working for a cooking oil business.

The cell phone Rivas' family used to reach him has stopped working.

"I called a thousand times," Montoya says. "It rang and rang, and then a message said it was out of service."

Now his family fears he's one of thousands of migrants who've died on the perilous journey north. It's grown more dangerous as security increases along the U.S.-Mexico border, but that didn't stop Rivas and others like him from taking the risk.

Rivas could have taken any path to the United States -- all dangerous, though crossing through the Arizona desert stands out for its cruelty.

The possibility that Rivas didn't make it doesn't stop his family from searching for signs of his whereabouts.

"Everything we have done has been futile ... going to the newspapers, morgues, prisons, courts ... and nothing," Montoya says.

At least 350 people from El Progreso have gone missing on the trek from the Central American nation to the United States, according to Cofamicro, a Honduran organization of volunteers trying to help families find their relatives.

Before, all these families could do was wait and wonder. But now they have another option.

That's why today, many gather inside a large community classroom in El Progreso.

Women like Montoya sit at tables around the room, answering a series of questions from investigators. Then they hold out their hands.

Technicians prick their finger with needles, then press them into a piece of paper.

For Montoya, the small red circle of blood left behind is her latest way of asking a question she's been desperately posing for nearly two years: Where is my son?

'The first steps'

Mercedes Doretti is the director of the New York-based Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which is collecting DNA from family members and unidentified corpses in the hope of finding a match. "It's a huge challenge," she says, "and we are still barely taking the first steps."

Someday, hopefully soon, Mercedes Doretti may have the answer.

For decades, she's helped lead a team of investigators into some of the world's most violent places and harshest environments. Their mission: Solving the mysteries of missing people who are victims of violent crime or human trafficking.

Her organization, Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), based in Brooklyn, New York, started out as a group dedicated to identifying the bodies of dissidents killed from 1976 to 1983 during Argentina's brutal military dictatorship. Over the years, they expanded their investigations to other countries, including Mexico -- where they first created a database dealing with migrant deaths while investigating murders in Ciudad Juarez.

More than four years ago, they set their sights on another dangerous region: the Arizona desert, where authorities say more than 2,000 migrants have been found dead in the past 13 years -- many of them without any identification.

Meanwhile, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, their family members -- like Montoya -- are searching for answers.

That's where Doretti and her team come in, collecting DNA from family members and unidentified corpses in the hope of finding a match.

The group has collected more than 1,700 DNA samples from families in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala. So far, they've identified 65 bodies.

Doretti sad it's still an overwhelming task. And even when they're able to find a match, it's a bittersweet victory.

"This is never a happy ending. We just try to reduce the time that families have to prolong their pain," she says. "It's a huge challenge, and we are still barely taking the first steps."

'Mass disaster'

In a cold, sterile room in Arizona, Pima County chief medical examiner Gregory Hess is taking another step.

When migrants' remains are found in the Arizona desert, investigators bring them to this morgue, where Hess and his team determine what caused their deaths and try to identify the bodies.

Almost every day, he says, the morgue gets a new set of remains found in the desert. Some are bodies whose facial features and physical characteristics are mostly intact. Others are little more than bones. All are tagged, placed inside plastic body bags and stored in a large, temperature-controlled warehouse where cold air and the stench of rot seep out every time the door is opened.

They methodically go over the bodies, looking for documents or belongings to create a case file for future identification, but sometimes, they don't have many clues.

Today, there are three skulls on the table in front of Hess -- remains, he says, that may be from migrants who died in the desert.

On the wall beside him, a poster describes the problem of missing and unidentified persons, calling it a "silent mass disaster."

At this point, it's too soon to tell very much about whose remains are on the table.

"If there is no personal property, how do you then identify who that skull is? That's difficult," he says. "The only way that's going to happen is through DNA. But you can take all the DNA in the world you want, but if you don't have anything to compare it to, it doesn't do you any good."

Dangers of the desert

Last year, the remains of 169 migrants arrived here. Authorities say the number of deaths in the desert has grown as security along the border increased after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Beefed up security aimed at blocking illegal immigration along the border has forced migrants from Mexico and Central America to cross in more remote and dangerous locations.

For migrants, making it to the other side of the border is only part of the treacherous journey.

"In the desert you find wild animals, you will get lost, you run into hostile vegetation ... many things happen in the desert," says Alfonso de Alba, vice consul of the Consulate of Mexico in Tucson, Arizona, where officials are often involved in the process of trying to identify the remains of migrants who perished along the way.

There is also the risk of robberies, rapes and beatings from bandits or smugglers, consulate staff says.

Most migrant deaths are the result of triple-digit temperatures in summer and freezing cold temperatures in winter, Hess says. Only 1% of deaths are due to violence.

Jeronimo Garcia, an employee at the consulate who's become a go-to person for American authorities when it comes to finding clues to the immigrants' identities, says he's warned many not to make the journey.

"You can never take enough water (or food)," he says. "I tell immigrants to not risk their lives in the desert. The smugglers don't see them as human beings, regardless of how much money they have paid."

But still, the migrants keep coming, and the list of unidentified remains in the Pima County morgue keeps growing.

Many of those immigrants carry no identification and sometimes their bodies have been abandoned for so long that only bones remain, Hess says.

For years, his office collected DNA samples from the remains and tried to match them to U.S. federal databases.

But since many of the immigrants had never been in the United States before, authorities couldn't get a DNA match.

That changed when the Pima County's Medical Examiner's Office and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team began working together. American authorities now can match the DNA of dead bodies in their database with the DNA of relatives of missing migrants in Mexico and Central America.

It's a complicated process that crosses international and state borders. Once the EAAF team collects DNA from family members, the information is compared with a DNA database in a lab in Virginia, which houses information from the bodies found in the Arizona desert.

"We are trying to assemble a regional system," Doretti says, "so that all the information collected and stored can be used to provide the families of the missing some closure."

Searching for a match

Back in El Progreso, the community classroom is filled with desperate families searching for answers.

It's one of several stops the EAAF made on a recent trip to Honduras and El Salvador, where they traveled to interview and take DNA samples from the mothers, fathers and siblings of missing migrants.

"The more samples that are taken, the better chance of finding a match," says Carmen Osorno, a member of Doretti's team. Each interview lasts about two hours and includes filling out a long questionnaire.

Some family members bring photographs, letters and other evidence, hoping authorities will undertake a more extensive investigation.

Paula Ivette Martinez carries a picture of her brother, Henry, in one hand and wipes away tears with the other hand.

"I'm glad you're here to help me find my missing brother and sister," she tells her interviewer.

Henry disappeared on his way to Miami, Paula says. Her sister, Ondina, went missing while she was making her way to Chicago several years ago.

"It is very sad," Martinez says. "My mother died without knowing what became of her children."

One family gets an answer; another is still asking questions

For nearly a decade, Jose Noriega and Carmela Ayala wondered what happened to their son, Luis Fernando.

He left Honduras in 2001 to work in America, then called them two years later to say that he'd made it. He sent money home around Mother's Day that year, and called to check in again a month later.

That was the

last they ever heard from him. Calls to the Honduran Foreign Ministry and other officials yielded no results.

Then, years later, a potential clue: In 2011, a Honduran newspaper published a list of names tied to unclaimed bodies at the Pima County morgue. There were 17 Central Americans, including four Hondurans. And one name immediately jumped out for Noriega: Luis Fernando.

But was it their Luis Fernando? Noriega says they didn't know where to turn next.

When the EAAF traveled to Honduras in September 2012 to take DNA samples, Luis Fernando's parents sought out the team's investigators, told their story and asked for their help.

The team returned to the United States with DNA from the parents, and compared it with data from the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office. They found a match for Luis Fernando.

"They said they were 100% convinced that it was our son," Noriega says.

Luis Fernando didn't perish crossing the desert, the parents learned, but unbeknownst to them died in a car crash.

Luis Fernando's ashes arrived at the Honduran capital's airport in a wooden box nearly a year later, on October 2, 2013. They were interred during Holy Week this year.

"Now I can die in peace," his mother says.

But another mother is still looking for closure.

Even though she's given her DNA to investigators, Corina Montoya still has hopes that her home telephone will ring and her son will be on the line.

Or, at the very least, that someone will call and tell her what happened to him.

Saturday 17 May 2014

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/17/us/immigrant-desert-deaths-dna/

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Plane crash in Laos kills several top officials

A Laos air force plane carrying senior government officials has crashed, killing the country's defence minister and at least five others.

The plane came down in a forested area of Xiangkhoung province, near one of Laos's major archaeological sites, the Plain of Jars, the Thai foreign ministry spokesman Sek Wannamethee said.

Laos National Television showed images of the aircraft with smoke rising from its charred remains.

The defence minister, Douangchay Phichit, was one of the country's deputy prime ministers and a high-ranking member of Laos' Politburo, the main decision-making body for the nation's ruling Communist party. Also among the dead were his wife, the governor of the capital of Vientiane, Sukhan Mahalad, and two other senior officials.

The Russian-made plane left the capital early on Saturday morning, heading for an official ceremony in the north-eastern province of Xiangkhoung, about 290 miles away.

The cause of the crash is not yet clear, but a witness said the plane crashed just over a mile away from the airport where it was due to land.

Around 20 people were believed to have been on board, according to Nipat Thonglek, the Thai defence ministry's permanent secretary. He said he was given the information by authorities in neighbouring Laos who did not immediately release details of the other passengers.

Thailand's Thai Rath newspaper identified the plane as a Russian-made Antonov AN-74.

"A Laos air force plane has crashed on its way to Xiangkhouang province in the north of the country. The mayor of Vientiane, the defence minister of Laos and his wife were on board," an official told Reuters.

Thailand's foreign ministry said it had been informed by Laos's government that the plane had crashed at 6.15am.

Laos is one of the poorest countries in Asia, under its authoritarian communist one-party government, and has a poor track record on air safety. Last October a civilian plane crashed into the Mekong river, killing all 49 people on board.

Saturday 17 May 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/17/laos-plane-crash-kills-defence-minister-wife-officials

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Bangladesh resumes search for missing in sunken ferry; 54 bodies recovered so far

Rescuers have recovered 54 bodies from a ferry that sank in a river during a storm in central Bangladesh, resuming their search Saturday after protests by relatives of people missing in the disaster.

Officials said that 12 people were still unaccounted for, although there has been confusion over how many were aboard the ferry M.V. Miraz-4 when it sank Thursday in the River Meghna.

Earlier Saturday, authorities called the search off after retrieving 40 bodies, but hundreds of relatives and local residents protested at the scene of the accident in Munshiganj district, forcing authorities to announce that they would continue to look for bodies.

"I haven't got my brother, where is he? Why do authorities stop searching?" asked Mohammad Moniruzzaman.

By late Saturday afternoon, a total of 54 bodies had been recovered, said Shamsuddoha Khandaker, chief of Bangladesh's water transport authority.

"We will continue our search," he said. "We have towed the ferry to the shore, but we will continue to search for bodies in the waters."

There has been confusion over how many passengers were on board the sunken vessel. Ferry operators in Bangladesh usually do not maintain a list of passengers, and none was available in Thursday's disaster, said local administrator Saiful Hasan.

Before 11 more bodies were recovered after the search resumed Saturday, police had estimated that at least 100 people were still missing.

Rescue diver Masudul Haque said Friday evening that many bodies were still trapped in cabin rooms.

"We have recovered the bodies mainly from the lower deck and other open spaces, but could not open the doors of the cabin rooms where many passengers took shelter after the storm had hit," Haque said. "I tried to open those doors but could not as huge volumes of sand have buried many of the doors."

Relatives of the missing and the dead have been gathering since Thursday on the banks the Meghna River, near where the boat capsized. Several bodies, covered in cloth, were laid out on the ground on Saturday.

"I came here yesterday for my brother, but I don't have any trace yet. Nobody can assure me of anything," said a sobbing relative, Lokman Hossain.

Sabuj, a passenger who jumped overboard when the ship began to sink, said he was among about 25 survivors who swam to shore. He said the captain of the double-decker ferry ignored the passengers' calls to stay close to the shore as the storm started brewing.

"But he continued to steer the ship" out into the water, said Sabuj, who uses one name.

The ferry was apparently overcrowded and its lower deck was loaded with goods, said Mohammad Ali, a director of the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority. Officials were investigating whether the vessel was overcrowded or had design faults.

Ferries are a common mode of transportation in this populous delta nation, and the Meghna River has been the scene of past accidents. In 2012, at least 150 people died when a ferry carrying about 200 people capsized at night in the river.

In 2003, an overcrowded ferry capsized in flood-swollen waters at the confluence of the Padma, Meghna and Dakatia rivers near Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. Up to 400 people died.

Saturday 17 May 2014

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/05/17/bangladesh-resumes-search-for-missing-in-sunken-ferry-54-bodies-recovered-so/

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