At least 51 feared dead as Taiwan passenger plane crash lands in Penghu

As many as 51 passengers of a TransAsia Airways flight died as it made an emergency landing in Penghu Wednesday evening, officials said.

Over the course of the evening, the number of casualties repeatedly changed, varying also from cable station to cable station. The Penghu Fire Department chief was quoted as saying 51 people died, but later news station TVBS said only one passenger had been confirmed as dead, with eleven saved and the fate of 46 still unclear.

Flight GE 222 was carrying 54 passengers and four crew members on a flight from Kaohsiung to Makung during stormy weather in the wake of Typhoon Matmo.

The ATR-72 aircraft had been scheduled to leave Kaohsiung at 4 p.m. but departed at 5:43 p.m. because of the poor weather. The pilot was reportedly asked to wait until 7:06 p.m. before being allowed to land.

A first attempt at landing reportedly failed, and the pilot then made a request to make a second try, reports said. Shortly later, the control tower lost contact with the flight, reports said.

The plane reportedly smashed hard into the ground in the township of Huhsi, causing a fire involving two homes. Online pictures showed a heavily damaged house and wreckage from the plane.

There was no immediate information about what caused the pilot’s change of plans and how the passengers were injured, though media reports spoke of a fire and of the injured suffering burns. They were taken to the military Tri-Service General Hospital in Makung, reports said, with cable stations reporting that one person showed no signs of life upon arrival.

The pilot was identified by the media as 60-year-old Lee Yi-liang and his co-pilot as Chiang Kuan-hsing, 39, but their fate was not immediately known.

First suspicions hinted that the accident might be linked to Typhoon Matmo, which passed over Taiwan and Penghu earlier in the day, bringing strong winds and heavy rains in its wake.

Online messages posted by residents spoke of a house on fire, with the blaze raging so hard that the rain failed to extinguish it.

Makung Airport was closed down after the incident, while in Taipei, Premier Jiang Yi-huah was preparing a visit to the Civil Aeronautics Administration, reports said.

Over the past 13 years, TransAsia Airways recorded eight accidents, including six with the French-Italian ATR-72, the Chinese-language Apple Daily wrote.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=2533674

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Forensic experts carry out 29 autopsies in three days after migrant tragedy

Mater Dei Hospital’s mortuary has seen the largest mass autopsy conducted since starting its operations in 2007, with 29 autopsies conducted on the bodies of 28 men and one woman recovered from the sea in the new migrant tragedy that took place outside Lampedusa this week.

The largest ever number of autopsies performed on one case was that of the EygptAir hijacking way back in 1985, on 60 bodies.

The 29 victims were those brought in by the Armed Forces’ maritime squadron on Sunday.

Forensic expert Dr Mario Scerri declined comment on Italian media reports that some of those who died in the tragic incident had been hit with hard objects and killed on board, saying that the official results of the autopsies would be given to the inquiring magistrate.

But Scerri said he could safely concluded that the 29 migrants died from drowning and that some of them might have been killed in a stampede to climb abord a rescue patrol boat.

Italian police on Tuesday said that migrants rescued by the Danish petrol tanker Torm Lotte in waters between Libya and Malta and taken to the Sicilian port of Messina, told investigators that around 60 people had been stabbed by traffickers, and their bodies thrown into the sea.

These deaths come on top of the 29 people known to have died by asphyxiation after the traffickers allegedly prevented dozens of migrants from leaving the hold.

Dozens of migrants are feared to have drowned during transfer to the Danish freighter from the rickety fishing boat that is thought to have been carrying between 700 and 750 people.

A child aged two was also found dead on arrival in Messina and a woman died while being transferred to hospital for treatment.

Earlier in the day migrants told Repubblica.it that 181 people had died in the tragedy but investigators put a closer estimate at 141.

On Tuesday five men presumed to be the traffickers were arrested on charges of multiple homicide.

They were Mhamed Morad Al Fallah, 21, from Syria, Youssef Dahman, 21, and Abdrzakc Asbaoui Asbaoui, 25, from Morocco, Saddam Abuhddayed, 25, from the Palestinian territories, and Jamal Rajeb, 32, from Saudi Arabia.

Investigators have also established that a double tariff system applied to the sea voyage, with migrants of Arab origin paying 1,000-2,000 dollars for a place on deck and Africans paying 250-500 dollars for a passage in the hold.

Since no documents were found on board the boat that can identify any of the victims, each of the victims will be given a referral number. Once all results of the autopsies and a sample of the DNA is taken from all the 29 victims, it will be up to the magistrate to release all bodies for burial.

The bodies are kept for a period of time and if no next of kin or anyone else can make a positive identification, then the burial will be done in a common part of the Addolorata Cemetery in Paola. Each body is separated just in case in the future somebody claims the remains.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/41498/forensic_experts_carry_out_29_autopsies_in_three_days_after_migrant_tragedy

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Body of the final missing Washington mudslide victim has been found

Four months after a mudslide ravaged a portion of Washington state, authorities announced Tuesday that they had located its final victim.

Rescue workers in Snohomish County found the body of Molly “Kris” Regelbrugge on Tuesday morning, offering an unexpected bit of closure to a search that seemed, in many ways, like it would never fully end.

“I’m humbled and honored that we are able return Kris to her family,” Sheriff Ty Trenary said in a statement. ““I’m also extremely grateful to the communities of Oso, Darrington and Arlington who stood beside us these past four months in our efforts to recover all of the missing victims.”

The search through the mudslide had, at one point, included hundreds of people scouring a wide and treacherous area. The slide area was incredibly difficult to search, since it was both unusually large and particularly gnarly (with debris, mud, wreckage and dangerous liquids).

Although no survivors had been found since the day of the slide, workers continued to dig through the debris and search for bodies.

The active search through the mudslide debris was called off in late April, more than a month after the slide that killed 43 people and left a trail of devastation. When the search was called off, the bodies of two victims — Regelbrugge and Steve Hadaway — were still missing, so the official death toll remained at 41.

But even though active search operations were called off, workers continued to try and look through the debris field and seek clues. In May, workers found a body that the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed several days later was that of Steve Hadaway.

Relatives had been worried that Hadaway would never be found as weeks of searching turned up nothing. “We were thinking worst case scenario the whole time, you know?” John Hadaway told KIRO-TV about the discovery of his brother’s body. “And here he is complete. We even got his wedding ring!”

At one point after the slide, the list of people reported to be missing had ballooned to 176. Even though that number was revised as emergency workers located people and figured out what names were duplicated, the immediate days after the slide were characterized with a distinct lack of what we knew. We saw the destruction, we knew dozens of people were potentially dead, but the toll remained unclear as workers spent days navigating the challenging environment. The list of missing people shrunk and the death toll began to rise, but this process required days of searching, waiting and not knowing.

On Tuesday at about 8 a.m., four months after the slide first struck and in an area where things belonging to the Regelbrugge family had been found, search personnel finally located Regelbrugge’s body. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner has to officially identify her to bring the death toll to 43, but officials said that after four months of searching, waiting and not knowing, they believe they have found the final person they were seeking.

The body of her husband, Navy Cmdr. L. John Regelbrugge III, was found days after the slide.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/07/22/body-of-the-final-missing-washington-mudslide-victim-has-been-found/

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MH17: Investigators concerned at missing bodies

International monitors said body parts still lay scattered at eastern Ukraine's unsecured crash site of downed flight MH17, as Dutch experts said they were given 80 fewer corpses than promised by the rebels.

"There were human remains that had not been picked up," said Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observer mission after visiting the scene, amid reports of the wreckage being rearranged.

"What struck us is that we did not monitor any recovery activity in place," he said, pointing out that OSCE observers saw human remains in at least two areas at the sprawling crash site in rebel-held territory.

Pro-Russian insurgents said on Monday they had released the bodies of 282 victims after they were sent by refrigerated train to the government-controlled town of Kharkiv, some 300 kilometres to the northwest.

But Dutch experts now in possession of the corpses said earlier today they had only counted 200 on the morgue train.

"We are sure of having 200 bodies and body parts, that is all that I know," said Jan Tuinder, the head of the Dutch delegation told journalists.

Flight MH17 was apparently brought down by a missile on Thursday with 298 people on board, including 193 Dutch citizens.


Five days after the incident, OSCE monitors said they noticed "changes" in the arrangement of the wreckage.

"We did observe changes at the site. The fuselage has been moved. It appears that the cone section is split in two and it appears that the tail fin has been moved," Bociurkiw said.

Western leaders have complained that rebels have been tampering with vital evidence at the site.

But Bociurkiw said there should be no "rush to conclusions" and the changes "could have been part of the effort to recover remains".

Fifteen monitors from the European security body visited the site for a fifth day on Tuesday, accompanied for the first time by a senior official from Malaysian Airlines and by two Malaysian civil aviation experts.

"There was no security perimeter. We also noticed that the vast amount of personal belongings of passengers has been removed from the scene," he added.

"The Malaysian experts observed that the heat from the impact was so intense that it melted the wings," which were made of aluminium, he said.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11297729

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