Surabaya issues death certificates for crash victims

Thirteen days into the search for passengers of the AirAsia plane that crashed into the Karimata Strait off Central Kalimantan, Surabaya municipality has issued 17 death certificates to victims’ families.

“We have issued 17 death certificates and will issue the rest in accordance with the identification procedure,” Surabaya Civil Registry and Population Office head Wardoyo said as quoted by Antara news agency at the Crisis Center at the East Java Police headquarters in Surabaya on Friday.

The office said it had issued the certificates based on records from the police and Bhayangkara Police Hospital and given them to the victims’ families.

“We must be very careful before issuing the certificates,” said Wardoyo.

As many as 78 of the 162 passengers on board the doomed Surabaya-Singapore flight were residents of Surabaya.

“The data has been validated through population identification numbers. We hope there won’t be any contradictory data,” said Wardoyo.

The death certificates, added Wardoyo, were required by families to claim insurance for the victims. The Surabaya municipality has provided facilities, including an integrated online system at the municipal post office at the East Java Police headquarters, to ease the issuance process.

He said complete data, including legalization of the victims’ identity cards, household cards and certificates from the hospital and police, would be sent through the online system.

“The death certificates will then be issued and handed to families of the victims,” he added.

A number of the crash victims from Surabaya have been identified, including Grayson Herbert Linaksita, 11, Hendra Gunawan Syawal, 23, The Meiji Thejakusuma, 44, Jie Stevie Gunawan, 10, and Juanita Limantara, 30.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has expressed concern over the slow pace of compensation payments to next of kin of passengers on board AirAsia flight QZ8501, urging that insurance payments be made. Transportation Ministry Regulation No. 77/2011 stipulates that the amount is Rp 1.25 billion (US$98,386) per passenger.

According to the central government, AirAsia must pay the victims’ next of kin regardless of the legal status of the flight. AirAsia Indonesia president director Sunu Widyatmoko has said the airline has ensured each victim would receive Rp 1.25 billion in compensation, which would be disbursed when the recovery and identification process had been completed.

Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini has said her administration was ready to file a lawsuit against AirAsia if it failed to adequately compensate families of passengers on flight QZ8501, following the suspension of the airline’s flight permit from the East Java city to Singapore.

Also on Friday, East Java Police chief Insp. Gen. Anas Yusuf said police would oversee the insurance claim disbursement process for victims’ families.

“We will oversee the process so the funds are immediately channeled to the right people,” said Anas at the East Java Police headquarters in Surabaya on Friday.

He added that police intended to query the management of AirAsia regarding insurance payouts for victims’ families.

“This is in line with the request from the central government to immediately compensate victims’ families, or at the latest seven days after the bodies have been identified,” said Anas.

Asked about the identification process at the Disaster Victims Identification (DVI) post at the East Java Police headquarters, Anas said he would try to speed up the process, but asked for more time from the affected families in view of the poor condition of the bodies.

“It’s quite challenging because we need two weeks for DNA identification, but we will try to accelerate the process because we have received assistance from other countries,” he said.

East Java Police DVI team leader Sr. Comr. Budiyono concurred, explaining that body-identification was no walk in the park.

“The poor and decomposing condition of the bodies has hampered the identification process and the DVI team mustn’t make any hasty decisions,” Budiyono pointed out.

Tail lifted from seabed

The Indonesian navy has retrieved from the seabed the tail of the AirAsia plane that crashed two weeks ago.

Divers used an inflatable device to pull the tail to the sea's surface.

They are also searching for the plane's "black box" flight recorders, which officials believe have been separated from the tail section.

Saturday 10 January 2015

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/01/10/surabaya-issues-death-certificates-crash-victims.html

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91 missing in Surkhet flood declared dead

District Disaster Rescue Committee, Surkhet, declared as many as 91 persons missing in the massive flood in the district a month ago, dead, today.

District Administration Office Surkhet said it declared all the disappeared persons dead at a press meet today.

Assistant Chief District Officer Jagat Bahadur Basnet said that they were declared dead as per the decision of the concerned village development committee representatives, all party meeting, Nepal Police, Nepali Army and locals.

With this declaration, the death toll has reached 125 in Surkhet’s deadly flood this monsoon.

Of the disappeared, the bodies of 34 persons were recovered. According to Basnet, the missing were declared dead in accordance with the advice of their kin as they had no hope of recovering them alive. As many as 29 persons from Tatapani VDC, 24 from Hariharpur, 16 from Taranga, 13 from Satakhani, six from Babiyachour, and one from Birendranagar municipality and the same number from Matela VDC had gone missing. The declaration has paved the way for relatives of the missing to receive relief.

Assistant CDO Basnet said they would grant relief to the victims’ families immediately after they posted relation verification documents and recommendation letters from the concerned VDCs. According to him, Rs 40,000 for each dead person and Rs 100,000 is distributed to the kin of the dead.

Of the 34 bodies that were recovered, the kin of 21 families received Rs 15.8 lakh, said Basnet. The kin of two missing, whose bodies were found, are yet to come into contact, whereas 10 of the recovered bodies are yet to be identified, informed the office.

Tuesday 9 September 2014

http://www.thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=91+missing+in+Surkhet+flood+declared+dead+&NewsID=426874

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Nigeria: No justice for the dead

Hundreds of fatal police shootings which each year leave families anguished and bereaved are not being investigated effectively because of a failure of the Nigerian justice system, Amnesty International says in a report released today.

Nigeria: No Justice for the Dead illustrates the gaps in the investigation of deaths following police action in Rivers State where basic techniques of crime scene protection and investigation are not applied and autopsies and inquests are either not carried out or are inadequate.

Relatives are often left with no answers about the fate of their family members and rarely receive justice.

Amnesty International believes Rivers State is representative of other Nigerian states where violent deaths at the hands of the police are not investigated adequately.

Medical and legal sources revealed that there is a practice of doctors signing death investigation reports without examining the body properly.

In many cases the identity of the deceased is not known to the police and bodies are registered as “unknown”. Little effort is made by police to identify them.

The lack of investigation in Nigeria means that many of the police officers who appear to have used unlawful lethal force enjoy impunity, seriously undermining human rights protections.

“To have one of your friends or family members killed by the authorities causes terrible anguish, but never to find out the truth of what actually happened to them causes a particular agony for relatives of the victims,” said Lucy Freeman, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Africa.

“Many of the victims killed by the police each year may have been unlawfully killed – including in what constitutes extrajudicial executions. Effective and impartial investigations are crucial in determining the truth about human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, and gathering evidence to hold the perpetrators to account.”

Amnesty International found that in most cases of killings at the hands of the police, there was almost no action to hold them to account.

Pastor Ken Neele told Amnesty International that after learning of the shooting of his brother following police action in November 2011, he went to several hospitals in search of his body which he finally traced to Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital in Port Harcourt - the capital of Rivers State.

Pastor Neele was distressed by the disrespectful handling of his brother’s body, which was lying at the bottom of a pile of other bodies. More than a year later, Pastor Neele has still not been able to bury his brother - police have yet to approve the body’s release.

Other families told Amnesty International of their distress at seeing the way in which their relatives were "dumped" in the mortuary.

When an Amnesty International researcher visited Braithwaite they found the mortuary overcrowded with bodies dumped in piles on the verandah or on benches.

While this mortuary has now closed down, reports from a number of sources suggest that most others in Nigeria operate similar practices.

“It is a sad truth that in Nigeria the victims of police brutality and their families rarely receive justice,” said Freeman.

“In spite of the existence of domestic law and international standards requiring the investigation of such deaths, the lack of proper autopsies and inquests mean the perpetrators of these crimes are simply getting away with it.”

Amnesty International is calling on the Federal and State Governments of Nigeria to investigate all violent deaths in Nigeria, to ensure adequate autopsies are carried out by qualified personnel, and to hold those guilty of unlawful killings to account.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/nigeria-no-justice-dead-2013-02-05

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Followers of Unapproved Faiths Denied Rights

A seminar on agnostics and ancestral beliefs revealed that agnostics and followers of unofficial religions are often denied civil rights in Indonesia because the state only recognizes six religions.

Participants from 35 remote communities who inherited their faith from their ancestors attended the seminar.

“The [blank] strip on the religion column in their identification card [KTP] often caused them to lose their civil rights such as birth, marriage, death certificates and even denied health services,” Eva Kusuma Sundari, of House Commission III which oversees legal affairs, said on Friday. “They are also denied their rights to education and jobs because they don’t have a religion.”

“You can say that the discrimination against followers of ancestral beliefs is systematic from the day they were born until the day they die. The public often rejected their bodies to be buried in public cemeteries,” Eva said.

Eva said that Law No.23/2006 does not require agnostics and followers of unofficial religions to fill in the religion column in their KTP, but to simply put a strip on the column or leave it vacant.

“However, the Home Affairs Ministry’s breakthrough to allow agnostics [and followers of other religions] to provide a letter from their organizations didn’t help solve the discrimination problem,” she said.

She added that the government’s authority to determine whether or not a religion is official has been straightened out by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the government does not have the authority to determine the legality of a religion.

“Therefore, the decision which said that the state only recognizes six religions is automatically invalid. Based on the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Home Affairs Ministry, including the directorate general of civil administration, should implement the law. This means the requirement to fill up the religion column is no longer in accordance with the Constitution,” said Eva.

Saturday 22 December 2012

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/followers-of-unapproved-faiths-denied-rights-eva/563110

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Give death certificate to blast victim's kin: Court

The Delhi High Court Friday directed a civic agency to issue death certificates to the kin of three men killed in a 2005 bomb blast to facilitate payment of compensation to them.

The court's direction came after police said that even after seven years of the blast, all the three men could not be traced.

Police said they had filed a report that the victims were untraceable so the civic agency could issue the death certificate.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher asked New Delhi Municipal Council to issue death certificates to the family members of Michael John, A. Ganeshan and Sayan Mukhopadhyay, whose bodies could not be found after the blast.

The court further directed the city government to start the process of granting payment of compensation to the kin of the men who died in a bomb blast in Sarojini Nagar Market.

The court was hearing a plea filed by Manisha Dass claiming that when she was eight years old, her parents and brother died in the blast Oct 29, 2005.

Dass claimed that Michael John was in the market on the date of the blast in 2005 and was missing for the past seven years.

She said the body of her father Michael John was not found and the authorities refused to give compensation for his death.

The Delhi government had given Rs.7.5 lakh compensation to Dass for the deaths of her mother and brother.

The family members of Ganeshan and Mukhopadhyay also filed pleas before the court which were clubbed with Dass's petition.

The court would next hear the case Jan 29, 2013.

Thursday 20 December 2012

http://twocircles.net/2012dec20/give_death_certificate_blast_victims_kin_court.html

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Dana Crash: Lagos issues 89 death certificates to victims’ families

Ikeja – No fewer than 89 families of victims of the June 3, ill-fated Dana plane crash have been issued death certificates.

Gov. Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State disclosed this on Thursday while speaking to newsmen shortly after holding a closed-door meeting with some of the families at the Government House, Ikeja.

He said that those who were issued certificates were families of 141 victims whose bodies had been successfully identified so far, adding that 51 families were yet to collect the certificates.

The governor also said nine bodies were yet to be identified, explaining that the DNA samples of five were not initially supplied by their families while the remaining four could not be identified immediately.

“We have, however, taken fresh samples of the five bodies and have in fact sent them abroad.

“If that is successful, it will leave us with how to proceed with the remaining bodies because we cannot identify them,” he said.

Fashola said talks were in progress with the families on holding a memorial service to honour the victims and build a cenotaph around the crash site or any other site to immortalise them.

He praised the understanding and patience of the victims’ families, saying even in their moments of grief, they worked with the government in resolving the problem of identification of the bodies.

“The crash, though very regrettable, should make the nation ponder about all that is wrong about the aviation sector and do the right things to reposition it,” the governor said.

Speaking with newsmen, family members of some of the victims demanded a total overhaul of the aviation sector to forestall a recurrence of the mishap.

One of them, Mr Seke Somolu, urged the Ministry of Aviation to publish the findings of the investigation into the crash.

He said if the report was not published and the whole process was not made transparent, it could mean that the authorities and the airline were unwilling to inform Nigerians about the actual cause of the incident.

Somolu also queried what he described as “the hasty restoration of Dana’s operating licence”, saying, “it portrays insensitivity of what families of the victims are going through.”

Mrs Onyinye Okocha, who lost her husband to the crash, said the only thing that could provide some consolation to the families was for the government to make the country’s skies safer.

She said the country’s aviation sector was bedevilled by many problems, calling on the Federal Government to take radical steps to address the problems.

Okocha commended the Lagos State Government for the `compassionate way’ it had handled the unfortunate incident so far, and for DNA analysis of victims, which she said was highly appreciated.

Dana’s aircraft carrying 153 passengers crashed at Iju-Ishaga, a suburb of Lagos, on June 3, killing everyone on board.

Friday 14 September 2012

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/09/dana-crash-lagos-issues-89-death-certificates-to-victims-families/

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