Rains hamper Sri Lanka mudslide tragedy search effort

Heavy rains disrupted a massive search on Thursday for scores of people feared buried in a landslide on a Sri Lankan tea estate, further dimming prospects of finding anyone alive.

Hundreds of troops suspended their work as rains threatened more mudslides at the plantation in central Sri Lanka, a day after scores of tin-roofed homes were buried under tonnes of mud.

"We are suspending the search operation because it is not safe to work in this rain," the region's top military officer, Major General Mano Perera, told reporters.

"We hope to start work tomorrow morning if the weather improves."

Perera said they failed to find any survivors or bodies from the disaster site on Thursday. He did not hold out much hope of finding survivors as the site was covered in tonnes of mud.

"There were no concrete structures which could have acted as air traps for victims to survive," he added.

Shop keeper Vevaratnam Marathamuttu said he ran when tonnes of earth came crashing down the hill on Wednesday morning, fearing there had been an explosion.

"I thought it was some sort of a bomb blast and fled from my shop," Marathamuttu said. "I saved my life because I ran away."

Truck driver Sinniah Yogarajan, 48, said there was "no point in my living" after five members of his family along with his friends were buried in the disaster.

"The entire neighbourhood has vanished. Now there is a river of mud where our houses once stood," Yogarajan told AFP at a nearby school where survivors were sheltering.

"The soldiers are trying their best but every time they scoop out some of the mud the hole then just gets filled up again with more mud."

Although only a handful of bodies have been recovered so far, the government's disaster management minister voiced fears on Wednesday night that 100 people may have been buried after he visited the site.

There had been fears of an even higher toll when officials initially said that up to 300 people were unaccounted for, but the minister said most of those who were classified as missing were later found at work.

Some 75 children were already at their school nearby when their homes were buried, officials said, adding that they were checking on reports that at least two children had lost both parents.

Fears of more landslides

President Mahinda Rajapakse visited the disaster area in Koslanda on Thursday, speaking with survivors now sheltering at two schools. He later inspected the Meeriyabedda tea plantation which bore the full brunt of the mudslide.

During the day, soldiers were seen clearing debris from the mud, as curious onlookers as well as survivors whose relatives were missing gathered at the site despite appeals to stay away.

Labourer Arumugam Thyagarajah, 28, said his six-year-old daughter was washed away in the mudslide as she walked with her older brother to school.

At least 1,200 people from nearby tea plantations have also been evacuated from their homes amid fears that ongoing rains could lead to more mudslides, officials said adding that more people were expected at relief centres.

Sri Lanka's picturesque hill region is famed for producing Ceylon tea and has become a major tourist attraction with visitors able to stay on the plantations.

The number of homes destroyed was revised down to 63 on Thursday from 150 given earlier by the national Disaster Management Centre (DMC).

"We had difficulty communicating with our officers and sometimes rumours were reported to us as facts," the Colombo-based DMC spokesman Sarath Kumara told AFP.

An office where village records were maintained was also destroyed in the disaster, causing problems for the authorities in compiling reliable casualty figures.

Sri Lanka, a tropical island at the foot of India, is prone to weather-related disasters -- especially during the monsoon season when the rains are often welcomed by farmers.

If the death toll does reach three figures, the disaster would be the country's worst since the December 2004 tsunami when 31,000 people died.

Thursday 30 October 2014

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/rains-hamper-sri-lanka-mudslide-tragedy-search-effort-614128

Shining Path victims' remains returned 30 years after their deaths

The remains of 65 victims of the Shining Path have been returned to their families 30 years after they were killed.

Men, women, and children who were killed by the Shining Path between 1989 and 1991 have finally been returned to their families for identification and burial. People came from 25 communities to Huamanga to bury their dead, whose bones and the clothes they died in were presented in small white coffins, just over a meter long, along with the few objects they had on them at the times of their deaths.

Relatives had traveled from their distant homes to identify the remains of their family members killed so many years before. The bodies had been hidden in clandestine graves until four years ago, when they were disinterred and the lengthy identification process began. Experts used DNA tests, dental records, and anthropological forensics to identify them. They had been killed by members of the Shining Path, as well as police and the military.

Prosecutor Carlos Américo Ramos Heredia presided over the handing over of the remains of the victims. The ceremony took three hours and was attended by around 200 relatives.

Adelina García, president of the Association of Families of Kidnapped, Arrested, and Disappeared of Peru, is the wife of a man who went missing in the Los Cabitos barracks in Ayacucho back in 1983. “It’s a satisfaction to give a Christian grave to loved ones after many years, others still have their hearts in pain for not finding them and not having accomplished that the guilty are punished,” she told Peruvian daily La República.

Ramos admitted that there was a long road ahead of them, saying that there were still a lot of makeshift graves to discover and that they needed more prosecutors specialized in human rights.

2,925 bodies were discovered from 2006 to July 2014, 1,689 of this number have been identified and 1,485 have been returned to their families. La República notes that these numbers are very small when compared to the number of people who are still missing. The 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that 15 thousand people disappeared in the years the Shining Path was active in Peru.

Thursday 30 October 2014

http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-shining-path-victims-remains-returned-30-years-after-their-deaths-104326

Families of missing in Sewol ferry disaster demand new search plan after body find

The families of passengers still officially listed as missing from the sunken ferry Sewol demanded Wednesday that the government come up with a thorough plan to find and recover the bodies.

The call came after a badly decomposed body, presumed to be that of a woman, was found inside the submerged ship Tuesday afternoon, more than six months after the ferry sank in waters off the southwestern island of Jindo, leaving more than 300 people dead in one of the country's deadliest maritime disasters.

After running into obstacles, divers retrieved the body from the fourth-deck female bathroom a day after its discovery, officials at the site said. They said the remains will be sent to a mortuary for positive identification using DNA screening.

"We demand that the government review the search plan for November and come up with a new thorough search plan," the families said in a press release.

On Monday, the family members said they had voted against salvaging the ship and asked the government to continue its search operation.

The outcome of the vote was made public hours after a private diving company announced its decision to pull out of the joint operation with the government and military after three months, citing "various circumstances."

The 6,825-ton ferry Sewol sank on April 16 en route to the southern resort island of Jeju. Of the total number of people on board, most of whom were high school students, only 174 were rescued.

Wednesday 30 October 2014

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20141029001101