Japan is struggling to deal with the remains of dead North Korean sailors who keep washing up in 'ghost ships'

Nearly 90 boats, suspected to have come from North Korea, have gone adrift this year and Japan is struggling with what to do with the bodies of those found on board.

The so called "ghost ships" are thought to be North Korean fishing boats and have been drifting ashore in Japan for years. This year, 89 boats washed ashore and, since 2013, 345 mysterious boats have found their way to Japan.

And while Japanese officials are not willing to confirm how many bodies have been discovered on the boats — because of unspecified "diplomatic repercussions" — there would easily be dozens of retrieved bodies that need to go somewhere.

In the past, boats have been dismantled and bodies cremated before being sent to shrines, but these processes bear significant costs.

The Japan Times reported this week that the local government in Oga, hopes to eventually be able to return the cremains of eight bodies it cremated to their families. The government kept fingernails and toenails from each of the bodies, that were all found on adrift boats since November, so as to be able to identify each of them by DNA in the future.

The bodies are being kept indefinitely in eight plain white boxes on a table at the back of a Zen temple, according to The New York Times. If they are never claimed they will eventually be buried in a "grave for unknown souls."

Japan Times reported North Korea has lodged a request for several of the cremains in Oga.



Another government in Tsuruoka, south of Oga, has cremated five bodies found on its beaches in December. Cremains from two of those bodies have also been kept alongside badges of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung that were on the bodies when they were discovered.

Like many countries, Japan does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. What they do have is a contentious history. North Korea previously admitted to kidnapping Japanese nationals from beachside towns decades ago, and many of North Korea's recent missile tests have landed in the Sea of Japan.

Earlier this year, South Korea's newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported many of the fishermen's remains who arrive in Japan on ghost ships are not returned to North Korea because North Korea won't pay for their repatriation.

Japan charges two to three million yen ($17,000 to $26,000) to cover the costs of destroying the boats and cremating bodies.

While the two countries don't officially communicate, they both have local Red Cross organizations that have coordinated discussions on several occassions.

An official told Japan Times "all we can do is wait for contact from the Japanese Red Cross or others" because of the lack of diplomatic channels.

The North Korean Red Cross has requested the return of some fishermen in the past (Japanese officials reportedly don't actually expect North Korea to pay the fees), and the Japanese Red Cross Society passed on a request from North Korea to return the cremains of the eight bodies in Oga on December 6.

It is not clear if the ashes have yet been sent back to North Korea. If they haven't, they will still be under the care of temple priest Ryosen Kojima.

"They are humans just like us," Kojima told The Times. "But they have no one to look after their ashes."

Saturday 23 December 2017

http://uk.businessinsider.com/without-diplomatic-relations-japan-struggles-with-north-korean-ghost-ships-2017-12?r=US&IR=T

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Best way to identify a missing person? It’s all in the soles of your feet

Efforts to identify bodies of victims of natural disasters or people with dementia who are under protective custody using the soles of the feet are underway in Japan as the system is expected to help speed up the identification process once it comes into effect.

The move is led by former members of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), who argue that skin ridge patterns of feet because they remain intact for one’s lifetime can serve like fingerprints since they are unique among individuals.

Akira Mitsuzane, 68, former head of the MPD’s first investigation division that handles crimes including murders and robberies, and Hideo Kaneko, 69, a former member of the MPD’s crime scene investigation division, came upon the idea of using feet ridge patterns after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in March 2011.

They witnessed multiple cases in which family members of victims had the wrong bodies identified as police, who tried to return victims’ bodies to their families as quickly as possible, misidentified the bodies as they relied on victims’ clothing and other body traits for the identification.

“It takes time and money to conduct DNA analysis and you can’t always obtain fingerprints. For the purpose of identification (of bodies) alone, ridge patterns of feet have some more suitable characters,” said Kaneko.

Ridge patterns are usually taken from an area right under toes and they are preserved in many cases since the skin is thicker and the area protected by shoes, even though other parts of the body might be damaged in disasters.

It takes time and money to conduct DNA analysis and you can’t always obtain fingerprints. Mitsuzane believes people are more inclined to register their feet ridge patterns as opposed to fingerprints due to privacy concerns and the risk of the unintended use of information.

It is necessary to preregister and store one’s ridge pattern information to run the identification system, but collecting data only requires placing a foot on a scanner.

Asked by Mitsuzane and others, a major electric appliance maker has developed a portable scanner prototype, which weighs around 20 kilograms, and is capable of instantly scanning and storing data.

The fact that many demented elderly are under protective custody but unable to be identified is a serious issue as well.

According to the 2014 statistics by the MPD, the number of reported missing seniors who are believed to suffer from dementia is 10,783 in Japan. Also, 75 victims of the March 2011 disaster still remain unidentified as of the end of February 2016.

“The use of foot ridge patterns can be an effective preparation for the future,” said Mitsuzane, adding that some 20,000 and over 300,000 victims would be expected in the event of a possible Tokyo inland earthquake and the Nankai Trough earthquake, respectively.

“The fact that many demented elderly are under protective custody but unable to be identified is a serious issue as well,” Mitsuzane said.

Monday 14 March 2016

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1924570/best-way-identify-missing-person-its-all-soles-your-feet

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Poland reburies 35 victims of Stalin-era terror

The bodies of 35 victims of a Stalin-era campaign of terror in Poland were reburied at a solemn ceremony on Sunday after being exhumed from mass graves and identified.

Digs carried out recently at a military cemetery uncovered a number of mass graves and have led to the exhumation of around 200 bodies of victims of the Stalinist regime in Poland following World War II.

"We are now attempting to discover the fate of each one of these victims, so that, as far as possible, no one remains anonymous, to put a name to the communist reign of terror of 1945-1956, to document it and portray it," Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said at the ceremony, which was broadcast live on television.

The 35 wooden coffins were placed in a new mausoleum at the Powazki cemetery in Warsaw.

The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which oversees a vast programme of excavation work across the country, hopes to find and identify the remains of Witold Pilecki, a Polish partisan who infiltrated the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp, in order to share his experience with the world.

Pilecki escaped from the camp after three years, but was arrested after the war by Poland's communist authorities loyal to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, accused of espionage and sentenced to death. His body was never found.

The institute believes that around 50,000 people were killed during the post-war campaign of terror, with many still in mass graves.

Digs are under way across the country that have led to the exhumations of more than 600 bodies, 41 of which have so far been identified through DNA.

Monday 28 September 2015

http://news.yahoo.com/poland-reburies-35-victims-stalin-era-terror-175134580.html

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Texas: Hearing set on identifying immigrant remains

Efforts to improve the identification process of undocumented immigrants who die while crossing from Mexico into Texas will take center stage in the Rio Grande Valley today.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission will host a public meeting at the Edinburg Conference Center at Renaissance, Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, has announced.

The meeting will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the facility, which is located at 118 Paseo Del Prado, near the intersection of McColl Road and Dove Avenue in southwest Edinburg.

The gathering in Edinburg, which is the result of a last-minute amendment on May 26 by Canales to Senate Bill 1287, will focus on what is known as the Rio Grande Identification Project.

The Edinburg lawmaker’s amendment created the Rio Grande Identification Project and requires the Texas Forensic Science Commission — a state agency — “to develop a method for collecting forensic evidence related to the unidentified bodies located less than 120 miles from the Rio Grande River,” Leigh M. Tomlin, with the Texas Forensic Science Commission, stated in an advisory about the Edinburg meeting.

“In accordance with its legislative mandate, the commission is working with stakeholders to develop a systematic plan for proper forensic evidence collection of biological material that may help identify human remains found along the border. The goal for the session is to establish best practices in Texas for subsequent publication and dissemination,” Tomlin explained.

Canales said an estimated 1,000 immigrants without any identification have died in the Rio Grande Valley during the past 10 years.

In the summer of 2014, international attention was focused in deep South Texas with the discovery that mass graves of hundreds of suspected unidentified immigrants were buried haphazardly in a cemetery in Brooks County.

In addition, hundreds of immigrants’ bodies have been recovered on the ranches in Brooks County in recent years. Smugglers guide immigrants through the brush trying to circumvent a Border Patrol highway checkpoint an hour’s drive north of the border. There is little water and the walk can take two or three days in punishing temperatures.

The House District 4o lawmaker recalled how the Legislature late last spring took action to bring compassion and closure to thousands of families who never know what happened to their love ones who crossed into Texas seeking a better life.

“It was spontaneous. I just noticed the subject of the bill and it got me out of my chair,” Canales said.

“I ran to the front of the House of Representatives and said, ‘I have an amendment to this bill, hold on.’”

The passage of his amendment was even more remarkable given the political climate in the Legislature, he noted.

“I think it was one of my most exciting moments in the Legislature,” Canales said. “I was a little over jubilant that it passed, especially with the anti-immigrant sentiment that exists in the Texas Legislature. I think it’s a great victory.”

“I think that it’s unquestionable what role immigrants play in our daily lives in our economy,” Canales said. “Not only do we need to respect what they do for our country but we need to respect human life in death.”

Monday 28 September 2015

http://www.valleymorningstar.com/news/local_news/article_65aca646-6587-11e5-aaa3-ef6dbf931928.html

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Anthropology in action: Identifying missing migrants

A hairbrush. A bus ticket. A stuffed purple dinosaur. A container of Vaseline.

These are among the many items left in the desert by immigrants who attempt to cross into the U.S. from Mexico. And they are sometimes the best clues authorities have for identifying those who die traversing the rugged terrain.

In Arizona, an average of 170 men, women and children lose their lives crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every year. Because of harsh desert conditions, their bodies often are unrecognizable by the time they are found, making it nearly impossible to identify them and notify their families in Mexico.

Robin Reineke, a UA anthropology doctoral student, is committed to finding out who they are.

"Thousands of families are suffering without answers, and anthropologists have a duty to show up," she says. "These are vulnerable people from places traditionally studied by anthropologists, and they're losing their lives in the city where we live."

Reineke is executive director and co-founder of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, a family advocacy organization that is working to end migrant deaths.

The center works with families and forensic scientists to collect missing person's reports and to identify those who die in the desert. The organization also works on policy reform, and partners with artists and storytellers to raise awareness of humanitarian issues on the border.

Reineke began her efforts in 2006, during her first year as a graduate student in the UA School of Anthropology. She was interested in how cultural anthropology could be applied in conjunction with forensic anthropology to help in a disaster or conflict.

Aware of the crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, she reached out to forensic anthropologist Bruce Anderson in the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

Reineke was inspired by Anderson's efforts to identify the bodies of border crossers. It's not typically the job of a medical examiner's office to manage the missing person's side of an investigation, but because immigrants are not U.S. citizens — and therefore local law enforcement doesn't handle their cases — Anderson had taken it upon himself to help families identify their loved ones, using detailed physical descriptions and clues such as jewelry and other personal effects found with bodies.

"I was really motivated to work with him because I recognized him as someone with an intense moral compass," Reineke says. "In addition to having the highest caseload in the country of any forensic anthropologist, he was also taking down information from the family members who were calling his office directly looking for their relatives."

As the number of migrant deaths increased over the years, the job had become too big for one person, so after meeting with Reineke, Anderson enlisted her help. And thus the Missing Migrant Project was born.

Anderson had started the project with a three-ring binder of about 250 hard-copy missing person's reports that had been called in to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

Over the next seven years, Reineke took hundreds more of those calls as the office's in-house missing persons family advocate.

"Robin's a special person, and her drive and intellect and passion for this makes her the best person for this job," says Anderson, a UA alumnus and adjunct assistant professor in the School of Anthropology.

Reineke began managing a digital database of missing migrant reports. As word got out, her caseload grew to a whopping 1,300, and the need for more help became clear.

In 2013, with support of more than $100,000 from the Ford Foundation, Reineke and William Masson, a UA Eller College of Management alumnus, co-founded the Colibrí Center for Human Rights to continue and expand upon the work of the Missing Migrant Project.

The word colibrí is Spanish for hummingbird, which is a common Mexican symbol of safe passage and a messenger between the living and the dead. The center's name was inspired by a man who died crossing the border in 2009; among his remains was a small, dead hummingbird carried in his pocket.

Today, anyone who calls the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner to report a missing migrant is routed through the nonprofit Colibrí Center, which operates two offices — one inside the medical examiner's office and one in downtown Tucson. There, staff, volunteers and interns from the UA Honors College process the information and see if they can make a match to data about unidentified remains produced by Anderson and others at the medical examiner's office.

Call frequency can range from as few as three a week to as many as 15 a day during peak summer months, when deaths in the desert are at their highest, Reineke says.

With so many people missing and often very few clues, making a positive identification is challenging, but when successful, it can help bring families closure, she says.

"Those notification calls are some of the hardest things any of us have ever done in our lives, but in general it's cathartic for the family," Reineke says. "There's a lot of crying, there's a lot of pain, but very often they also express gratitude. For someone to express gratitude when they are hearing such terrible news, you know that that experience of having a missing person must have been torture."

Reineke's work with Anderson on the Missing Migrant Project and with the Colibrí Center has attracted national and international attention from media outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the BBC, among others.

The center now maintains the largest, most comprehensive database of missing migrants in the nation, and Reineke hopes to share the Colibrí Center knowledge and tools with other border communities.

"Part of what we're trying to do at Colibrí is take the knowledge and experience that we've gained working with the exceptional humanitarians and scientists here in Pima County and share that with smaller, less well-funded counties," she says.

For Reineke, the work is far more than just a job.

"There is a mass disaster occurring in our backyard," she says. "I feel very strongly that it's a moral obligation and duty to utilize my expertise and my training as an anthropologist to do the best I can for my fellow human beings who are living a nightmare very close to where I live."

Tuesday 15 September 2015

http://uanews.org/story/anthropology-in-action-identifying-missing-migrants

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Authorities struggle to identify dead in migrant tragedies

Adal Neguse, an Eritrean immigrant whose brother drowned in a smuggler's boat while trying to reach Italy in 2013, knows all too well what might be in store for the relatives of those dying now in similar accidents in the Mediterranean.

The emotional pain of looking at photos of badly disfigured corpses.

Red tape and wasted time with bureaucrats who "just talk and talk" but don't keep their promises.

As record numbers of desperate people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia flood into Europe, hundreds are also dying in risky journeys arranged by unscrupulous smugglers, and authorities are struggling to identify those victims.

When the body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach along with those of his mother and brother, he came to represent others who also have perished trying to seek a better life. But unlike the young Syrian refugee, many of them remain anonymous and unclaimed.

As of Sept. 1, at least 364,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe this year. More than 2,800 have died, or are lost and presumed dead, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Only about a third of the bodies recovered are ever identified, said Frank Laczko, head of the IOM's Global Migration Data Analysis Center in Berlin.

"If each person has 10 relatives, that's close to 30,000 people who are affected," Laczko said. Besides the emotional pain, survivors must cope with legal issues such as property ownership to the right to remarry.

When Austrian authorities opened a truck apparently abandoned by smugglers on a highway near Vienna on Aug. 27, they discovered 71 badly decomposed bodies of men, women and children, and officials said some may never be identified. Another tragedy that same day left Libyan authorities with the task of identifying scores of bodies from two boats that sank off the coast.

In a commercial disaster like a plane crash, authorities have passenger manifests, electronic tickets, credit card records and data from travel agencies to work with. But human traffickers understandably usually keep no records when they arrange passage to Europe for those paying cash, so there are no emergency contacts and no way to contact relatives. And many refugees carry no ID.

Laczko said his agency wants a Europe-wide database for families to provide information about missing relatives and for authorities to distribute details about bodies they have found. He also wants far more attention paid to mining data from cellphones found on victims.

In the case of the truck ditched in Austria, experts are studying documents found with the dead but also have taken their fingerprints, DNA samples and dental information, in addition to data from 10 cellphones, police spokesman Helmut Marban said.

A hotline with Arabic, English and German speakers received more than 100 calls in its first two days. The victims included Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees, police said Friday, but no identities have been established. Marban would not disclose if any relatives have been located, citing an ongoing criminal investigation.

Some 2,576 people, mostly Eritreans and other sub-Saharan Africans, have died or are missing this year in the longer and more hazardous sea route from Libya to Europe, and most of the estimated 600 bodies recovered have ended up in Libya or Italy, according to the IOM. At the same time, about 116,649 have arrived safely in Italy.

Greece has logged 245,274 arrivals via the shorter route from Turkey, with 102 people dead or missing. Sixty of those bodies were recovered and most of them were brought to Greece, while some were sent to Turkey, the IOM said.

When the bodies end up in Italy, its main forensics team, based in Sicily, gathers what information it can: fingerprints, a DNA sample, dental information and a list of tattoos and any other distinguishing marks.

Italy has plenty of experience, dealing with maritime disasters involving smugglers' boats for years. But two tragedies in 2013 off Lampedusa, a tiny island 70 miles (115 kilometers) closer to Africa than the Italian mainland, changed much about how the world views the waves of migrants.

On Oct. 3, 2013, a trawler sank near the island, and authorities recovered 368 bodies, mostly of Eritrean refugees. Eight days later, there was another shipwreck south of Lampedusa in which nearly 200 people are believed to have drowned.

Until recently, the bodies found were recorded in Italy's missing persons' register sparely: "African ethnicity," or even "shipwrecked." The minimal descriptions belied an official view of the futility of ever getting a positive identification.

"Before there was the view that we only needed to identify Italians. In reality, that's not the case," said Vittorio Piscitelli, who took over the government office for missing people in 2013.

The office recorded 1,300 missing people through June 30, 2014, most of them Italians and some dating back decades, but also including hundreds of migrants. From Oct. 18, 2013, through Aug. 26, 2015, Italy has received a total of 382 bodies, the Interior Ministry said.

Piscitelli and his team joined with other organizations to create a protocol for identifying the dead from the October 2013 tragedies. This year, they began reaching out to migrant and refugee communities in Europe to find relatives to help with the process. North America is next.

The physical descriptions in the Italian missing persons' ledger have grown more robust, and DNA samples were taken of all the October 2013 victims to help resolve more cold cases.

So far, the official protocol applies only to the October 2013 shipwrecks. DNA samples were not typically taken of migrant victims prior to those tragedies, and the identification process is otherwise handled by local police, meaning relatives must figure out which jurisdiction to contact. Piscitelli hopes to be able to expand it to apply to more recent wrecks.

Of the 368 bodies recovered from the Oct. 3, 2013, sinking and the 21 bodies in the second shipwreck, 195 were identified right away, Piscitelli said. Under the new protocols, nine more bodies have been identified, with tentative IDs on another 19.

One of the dead from Oct. 3 was the 26-year-old brother of Neguse, the Eritrean immigrant.

Neguse considers himself "the lucky one" to have his brother Abraham identified.

In an interview in a park near his Stockholm home, Neguse said the process took 18 agonizing months — from the moment smugglers in Libya confirmed his brother was aboard to the final DNA confirmation.

He went to Lampedusa immediately to seek information about his brother's fate, looking at hundreds of photos of the dead and eventually giving up under the emotional strain of seeing so many badly disfigured faces.

"I was there one week, and I couldn't find him. But I talked to his friend who was there. He told me ... he drowned. But I didn't get an official answer to my questions," Neguse said.

No one took a DNA sample from him on that visit. He finally gave one when he was there again for a memorial on the tragedy's anniversary. While there, he was told results would come in a month; the positive identification actually took six months.

"They promised a lot of things, but they don't keep their promises," he said.

Neguse said officials told him that Abraham is buried in Sicily in a grave that is marked with a number but not a name.

Piscitelli said identifying the remaining bodies from the October 2013 wrecks will require help from relatives, many of whom are out of reach inside oppressive nations or in conflict zones.

A group called the Oct. 3 Committee, meanwhile, works with the Eritrean diaspora in Europe, seeking both DNA samples and documents.

Gergishu Yohannes, an Eritrean living in Germany for 30 years, assists others who are struggling with the uncertainty of a vanished relative.

She is motivated by the loss of her brother, Abel, who disappeared in 2009 while on a small boat from Libya to Italy and has never been found.

The craft, carrying 85 people, ran out of fuel near Malta. Adrift and out of food and water, the passengers began dying one by one, and their bodies were thrown overboard. When Italians finally rescued three weeks after they had set off, only five remained alive, Yohannes said.

She helps others, she said, "so that they won't have a fate like me, waiting every day, and can identify their loved ones."

Until her brother's body is found, Yohannes said she cannot rest.

"One waits every day, and I'm still waiting today," she said. "I cannot give it up."

Sunday 06 September 2015

http://news.yahoo.com/authorities-struggle-identify-dead-migrant-tragedies-160128298.html

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Great East Japan Earthquake: Mystery man found dead among 3/11 rubble finally identified

A body pulled from burned debris after the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami has finally been identified as that of a 63-year-old man, according to the Miyagi Prefectural Police.

The police said Thursday that the charred body was found in May 2011 in an area in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, that had been severely damaged by fire.

He had lived alone and there was no report of a missing person from his family or relatives.

According to the Mainichi Shimbun, the police started to make a list in January of people who did not resume receiving public assistance after the disasters, and they eventually came upon the missing man.

Before that, they had released information to the public about what the man was wearing when he was found, though no one came forward with information.

The police found his relatives based on his family register and confirmed that their DNA and that of his remains matched. The remains were handed over to the relatives on Wednesday, the Mainichi reported.

The police said there are still 16 unidentified bodies in Miyagi Prefecture alone, according to the newspaper.

Friday 04 September 2015

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/09/04/national/dna-check-identifies-mystery-man-found-dead-among-311-rubble/#.VelFxukcTuh

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Austria struggle to Identify truck victims

Veteran police investigators say they have never faced a task like identifying the 71 bodies unloaded from the back of a truck found abandoned along a highway last week.

The victims, believed to have been mainly Syrian refugees trying to reach Germany, had apparently suffocated. They were so decomposed and drenched in bodily fluids that many of their documents were illegible. Hands were so deformed that traditional fingerprinting methods proved impossible.

Criminal investigators, many of whom had identified victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, are working 16-hour days at a disused veterinary clinic in Nickelsdorf, near where the truck was found Aug. 27. The stench and heat topping 90 degrees compounded the pressure, as most of the early work was done outdoors.

“This is both mentally and physically one of the most challenging jobs we’ve ever done,” said Chief Inspector Kepic Erwin, who heads the team handling the postmortem investigation. “We only focus on the work we’re supposed to do.”

Such gruesome finds are becoming all-too-common as Europe reels from the mounting death toll from the biggest influx of migrants in decades. At least 12 Syrians, including eight children ranging from 9 months to 11 years old, drowned Wednesday as they attempted to cross the Aegean Sea to reach Greece, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said.

The bodies of the 59 men, eight women and four children found in the truck in Austria were brought to Nickelsdorf, undressed, then sent to Vienna over the weekend for forensic examination.

Their papers and electronic devices are being cleaned and analyzed at a regional police station in Eisenstadt. Clothing and any other belongings remain in Nickelsdorf, where investigators painstakingly search through them for clues.

No one has been positively identified, but an Austrian government official said travel documents found so far suggest at least some of the victims were from Syria where civil war has raged for the past four years.

The grim work has brought the human tragedy in Europe’s unfolding migrant crisis into focus. People from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Africa are willing to risk their lives to reach safer, more prosperous countries—even going as far as packing themselves into a refrigerated chicken delivery truck with no room to sit and little air to breath.

Activists and migration experts say smuggling has boomed since Europe recently began tightening its internal borders. Hungary last weekend finished erecting a razor-wire fence along its wooded frontier with Serbia, one of the most-popular crossings on the route northward from the Mediterranean.

Many don’t make it that far. The International Organization for Migration says more than 2,300 people have died while trying to cross the sea into Europe so far this year.

Germany, with its relatively strong job market and generous benefits, has been one of the main destinations for the wave of migrants and refugees. Among the hundreds of people prevented from boarding Germany-bound trains at Budapest’s main railway station this week, some said they would turn to smugglers.

Overnight Tuesday, Austrian police rescued 24 Afghan teenagers crammed into a small, nearly airtight van, at risk of suffocation. The van’s two windows were darkened and sealed and the rear door had been barred from the outside, a police spokesman said. The driver—identified as a 30-year-old Romanian—was arrested after trying to run away.

Nearby, in Nickelsdorf, Mr. Erwin said his medical team hoped to finish the forensic research by Friday, while examination of the findings would continue for weeks. Some passengers may never be identified, he warned.

“We do, of course, want to identify everyone, but we have no guarantees,” said Lt. Col. Karl Wochermayr, who came from Salzburg to Eisenstadt to lead the 30 investigators working on identifications.

The task is complicated by the lack of information about the victims. Normally in such situations, authorities have a list of names or other details to match to specific bodies. “Here, we have no idea who we’re looking for,” Col. Wochermayr said.

They don’t even know how long the people had been dead. It could have been “anything from some hours to several days. It is still hard to tell, because of the heat,” which accelerates decomposition, Mr. Erwin said.

A police hotline and email address established to gather tips has received fewer than 200 descriptions of missing people, said Col. Wochermayr.

He said the number is unusually low, probably because relatives may be stuck in war zones or otherwise cut off from communications.

Worried family members and friends arrive at the police station in Eisenstadt daily, handing over photos of missing loved ones and providing investigators with DNA samples. On Monday one man arrived from Hannover, Germany, 500 miles away, because he feared his brother might have been on the truck, Col. Wochermayr said.

The van where the people died, still emitting an overwhelming stench that wafted to a nearby refugee camp, was moved Wednesday to “a safe place,” according to the state prosecutor.

At the former veterinary facility, a one-story gray building with loading bays resembling a warehouse, police Wednesday continued documenting the migrants’ possessions. One officer clad in a hazmat suit spread a pair of jeans darkened by bodily secretions across a sheet of white plastic on the ground. A second officer, also in white, took photographs while a third nearby in civilian clothes wrote down details called out by his colleague in a monotone.

“Black belt, leather. Jeans, dark blue…”

A second team in Eisenstadt is analyzing cellphones, USB drives and other electronic items found with the bodies that could offer clues to their identities.

Police declined to say what they had found, but note that chasing leads isn’t simple. Cooperation with police in Syria is largely out of the question, due to the civil war, and some victims may have come from areas now controlled by Islamic State militants. Police also worry that calling numbers in Syria found on cellphones could expose people there to dangers.

Col. Wochermayr said their current focus is on European phone numbers that might provide clues to the migrants’ final destinations.

Medical examiners in Vienna are collecting dental samples, DNA and records of identifying marks such as scars, implants or tattoos. All the information is being entered into a computer program that is also used by Interpol, an international organization that facilitates police cooperation.

“We’re working against time,” said Mr. Erwin. Even though the bodies have been cooled for almost a week, the decomposition doesn’t stop.

The examiners are all accustomed to dealing with corpses, but the work is nevertheless unusually intense, he said. Each evening a police psychologist arrives to talk with team members. “So that we don’t have to take all the mental images with us home,” said Mr. Erwin.

Thursday 03 September 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/austria-struggles-with-grisly-task-of-identifying-truck-victims-1441221521

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Technology a vital tool in identifying remains

It’s almost a cliché: The body was identified through dental records. That has been easier said than done in B.C. until very recently and is still problematic in much of Canada.

Canadian authorities have been far less precise about describing teeth than TV detective shows lead people to believe.

At one point, U.S. authorities suggested they were wary about counting Canadians as possibilities for unidentified human remains south of the border because there was such a big gap in relevant information available about their teeth, said RCMP Cpl. Kelly Risling of the B.C. Police Missing Persons Centre.

“Dental data is a cornerstone of forensic identification,” yet dental codes in Canada recorded just three kinds of teeth: missing, virgin and treated. The treatment was not specified as to the seven surfaces of each tooth, he said.

“I wanted to see our dental coding system brought more into the future, and now dental fillings are identified,” Risling said.

“Instead of just three codes, you’re going to have up to seven codes associated with a tooth,” he said.

Moreover, there is now a B.C. policy that dental information on missing persons must be sent to the provincial dental database and that dental profiles of unidentified remains be searchable.

“So we’re able to match forensically the dental information of missing persons against unidentified bodies. We’re the only province in Canada right now that’s doing that,” Risling said. “The system that was settled on was a system called Plass Data DVI. Plass is a disaster-victim identification software that is utilized by INTERPOL. It was utilized in Thailand following the tsunami in 2005. It proved to be an effective method of cataloguing dental information in order to perform dental comparisons with the goal of ultimately obtaining the identification of various unidentified victims.”

Dr. Tom Routledge, team leader for the British Columbia Forensic Odontology Response Team, or BC-FORT, is manager of the database, created about four years ago.

Outside B.C., there is no national repository of dental information, meaning that if the name of the dentist of a missing person or unidentified remains is not known, there isn’t much that can be done by way of identification.

Dr. David Sweet, a dentistry professor at the University of British Columbia affiliated with INTERPOL and head of the Bureau of Legal Dentistry, has also been enlisted to help identify missing persons.

According to UBC’s website, the bureau is “the first and only laboratory in North America that is dedicated to full-time forensic dentistry research, casework and graduate teaching.”

B.C. dentists are no longer left to guess what police need in terms of dental records.

Police now attend dental offices armed with a letter signed from Sweet asking them to turn over all original dental information to the officer in front of them. That data is couriered to BC-FORT and entered into the Provincial Dental Data Base for comparison against available dental profiles of unidentified bodies throughout B.C., Risling said. No dental information is entered on the Canadian Police Information Centre or the U.S. National Crime Information Centtre without the data having been reviewed and transcribed by BC-FORT, he said.

Dental records are just one improvement B.C. has made in recent years to speed identification of human remains.

The coroners service requires very particular types of information to make a targeted comparison. Risling developed an intake process that is now RCMP policy and is followed — but not mandated — by the majority of municipal police forces.

The intake policy states that every person missing for more than 90 days must have intake information submitted to the B.C. Police Missing Persons Centre. That includes a Missing Persons Query form — an MPQ — that contains date of birth, next of kin and considerable physical information, including surgeries, scars, tattoos, dental work and surgical implants that could be identified via manufacturers’ serial numbers.

Prior to the policy’s implementation, it was suggested that within 90 days, police get family DNA, ideally taken from a parent, and dental information. Now these efforts are a must-do, and Risling stressed that DNA collected for identification purposes will not be used in criminal cases. Families of missing persons sometimes don’t realize the significance of providing this information, he said.

“They’re often reluctant and sometimes they downright refuse when it comes to providing such things as DNA.” Without such information, authorities must keep open files that could have been eliminated via DNA matches.

“And that is a huge draw on our resources,” Risling said.

Also mandatory are the GPS co-ordinates of where the missing person was last seen.

The MPQ for Kenneth Boseley was submitted this year.

Using the physical profile of the body and the geographical co-ordinates of View Street, the Identification and Disaster Response Unit of the B.C. Coroners Service was able to draw a correlation between a missing person’s last-known location and the location of this deceased individual, who was then identified, Risling said.

Fingerprints ultimately led to the identification, with considerable credit going to Det. Const. Chantal Ziegler, the Victoria police investigator working with the team.

After the correlation was drawn between the remains and the missing person, it was a matter of hunting down Boseley’s fingerprints that had been on file with local authorities.

One change Risling is still working on: Seeing whether a specialist can modify photos of an unidentified dead person sufficiently to warrant release to the public in the interest of identification.

Monday 24 August 2015

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology-a-vital-tool-in-identifying-remains-1.2038488

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It never happened: How to deny genocide in the face of science

Scientific advances in DNA identification over the past 15 years have helped war-crimes investigators document to an unprecedented extent the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys around this town in 1995.

Yet even as these technological advances uncovered more damning evidence, many Bosnian Serbs have grown increasingly more resolute in their denial.

Last Friday night, two Bosnian Serb men standing beside a memorial to Serb war dead were a telling example. They insisted that Serbs are the victims of an international plot. They fervently argued — despite 93 mass-grave exhumations and 6,827 DNA identifications of the dead — that the mass killings have been grossly exaggerated.

Biased historical narratives, of course, have existed throughout history. The identification of the dead in Srebrenica demonstrates the ability of technological advances to produce a flood of factual information. Yet in many cases, the scientific statistics appear to have only given those willing to manipulate the numbers more arrows in their quiver.

The two Bosnian Serbs contended that roughly the same number of victims died on each side during the 1992-1995 war. When I asked how such a vast subterfuge had been carried out, one said the answer was simple. “As far as the Muslim side,” he told me, “there is a bigger lobby in America.”

The following morning, interviews with a dozen other Bosnian Serbs living near Srebrenica produced similar answers. As tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims drove past their homes to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the mass killings, Serbs dismissed the gathering and the idea of 8,000 dead as a “farce,” a “circus” and “make believe.”

“It’s definitely not correct,” said Budimir Todorovic, a 60-year-old electrician, as he calmly drank coffee with his family in his front yard as busloads of Bosnian Muslims drove by. “It’s not 8,000.”

Milan Rakic, a 48-year-old store owner, accused Muslims of stealing the bodies of Orthodox Christian Serbs and interring them in the town’s sprawling cemetery complex.

“There are a lot of Serb bodies buried in this memorial,” he said.

One elderly widow said that some Bosnian Muslims listed as dead in the Srebrenica memorial were, in fact, living in Germany. “The number is exaggerated,” she said. “There are many living people whose names are engraved on the gravesites.”

The woman, like the other Serbs interviewed, was genial and polite. The Serbs expressed regret about the war — the woman declared it “horrible, horrible.” But they echoed the arguments of Bosnian Serb nationalists who still dominate politics here. The nationalists contend that foreign powers, primarily the United States and Britain, stage-managed everything from the war itself to the burial of bodies in Srebrenica.

They dismissed the annual commemoration as a “provocation” also organized by meddling outsiders. They said the crowds were so large because “Western NGOs” paid people to attend.

“Everything is well coordinated,” one man standing at the memorial for Serb war dead told me. “No one from here is guilty for what happened.”

Denial is evident outside Bosnia as well. Disparate groups, including left-leaning academics, Russian government-controlled media and some right-wing Americans who talk about a Muslim takeover, scoff at the number of 8,000 dead.

In fact, the annual commemoration and cemetery here have become a global symbol of the international community’s failure to stop the killing in Bosnia. U.N. officials arrived in Srebrenica in 1993 and declared it a United Nations protected “safe area.” When Serb forces attacked it two years later, Dutch peacekeepers and U.N. commanders did little to defend the enclave, and it fell to Serb forces on July 11, 1995. Two weeks of mass expulsions and mass executions followed.

Twenty years later, an estimated 50,000 Bosnians and several thousand foreigners attended the anniversary commemoration last weekend. Dozens of foreign dignitaries did as well, with former President Bill Clinton saying the world must prevent more such killings.

In the largest DNA identification project ever, a nonprofit group called the International Commission on Missing Persons has collected 22,268 blood samples from Srebrenica survivors and matched them to 6,827 bodies.

“Huge advances in DNA identification have made it possible,” said Kathryne Bomberger, director of the project. “The science is moving rapidly.”

Along with 93 mass graves that have been exhumed, investigators have found bodies at 314 “surface sites” in the surrounding mountains. Yet the work is not over. With 8,000 men reported missing from Srebrenica and the nearby town of Zepa, another 1,200 bodies are believed to be scattered in the woods or in mass graves not yet located.

Finding the dead has been vastly complicated by a grisly Bosnian Serb effort to conceal evidence. Several months after the executions, Bosnian Serb forces dug up many of the mass graves and reburied the bodies in dozens of locations. In the process, many corpses were dismembered.

Body parts from single victims have been found at multiple sites. In one case, parts of the body of one victim, 23-year-old Kadrija Music, were discovered in five different mass graves 20 miles apart.

While the DNA identification of the bodies has received widespread praise, the uneven sentencing practices of the U.N.-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has elicited scorn from both Muslims and Serbs.

Bosnian Muslims hailed decisions from the tribunal, as well as the United Nations International Court of Justice, that ruled genocide had occurred in Srebrenica. But they criticized some of the sentences as far too short.

Meanwhile, Serbs insist they have been the victims of the court. They assailed the tribunal for ultimately acquitting Naser Oric, commander of Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica, though they say he is responsible for many deaths

“How many Serbs need to be killed for people in the world to see that Serbs are people, not animals?” asked Rakic, the store owner, who said his uncle was one of Oric’s victims. “Animals have rights but not the Serb people?”

International war-crimes investigators, however, say there is no proportionality in the deaths in Srebrenica or Bosnia as a whole. The say several hundred Serbs died in the fighting around Srebrenica, but the vast majority of them were Serb military forces.

Across the country, Bosnian Muslims made up 65 percent of the war dead and Serbs 23 percent, according to prosecutors. Yet Bosnian Muslims made up 44 percent of the population, according to a census conducted two years before the war. Serbs made up 31 percent.

Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb news accounts lay out a different narrative. They report that 1,300 Serb civilians died around Srebrenica, and a total of 3,267 Serbs were “murdered” across eastern Bosnia.

Dismissing the Bosnian Serbs’ statements as irrelevant conspiracy theories would be easy. But their assertions had an eerie familiarity. In conversations around the world, extremist Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, as well as some on the far right and far left of U.S. politics — have all featured similar arguments.

The stories usually involve a nefarious plot by outsiders to destroy their culture or faith, or future. They say they have had to act in self-defense. As the victims of the plot, they have no choice but to respond.

There is usually some distant, all-powerful covert force — the CIA, the Mossad, oil-rich Arab potentates — deftly stage-managing each event. Local people are helpless victims, with no responsibility for what occurs.

When I asked the Bosnian Serb men about the future of the former Yugoslavia, they said it would be decided in London and Washington. “Basically, how the English and Americans decide,” one told me. “That’s how it will be.”

Though there had been a decade of progress in Bosnia after the 1995 peace accord ended the war, the country has been moving steadily backward over the past 10 years. Bosnian Serb denial of the Srebrenica massacre is growing. Bosnian Muslim resentment of that denial is simmering.

Violence erupted at the 20th anniversary commemoration. Groups of young Bosnian Muslim men hurled stones and slurs at Serbian Prime Minister Alexander Vucic, a wartime ultranationalist now turned pro-Western moderate, forcing him to flee.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, meanwhile, is expanding internationally and applying the DNA identification system it developed to tragedies in other parts of the world. It is identifying the missing in Iraq, Chile and South Africa, as well as victims of typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the passengers shot down in a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine.

Yet scientific and technological advances seem to have changed few views. One new conspiracy theory circulated by Serb nationalists is that the remains recently buried in the Srebrenica memorial are Filipinos who died in typhoon Haiyan.

Friday 17 July 2015

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/07/17/it-never-happened-how-to-deny-genocide-in-the-face-of-science/

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Remains Of 36 WWII Marines Found On Island

The bodies of 36 US Marines have been found on a remote Pacific island more than 70 years after they died fighting the Japanese in the Second World War.

Mark Noah, director of US charity History Flight, said the remains of the men were discovered after a four-month excavation on Betio Island, Kiribati.

The men were killed during fighting in the Battle of Tarawa in 1943.

Mr Noah told Radio New Zealand: "(They) had an expectation that if they were to die in the line of duty defending their country they would be brought home... that was a promise made 70 years ago that we felt should be kept."

Among the bodies is thought to be Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry - America's highest military honour.

The citation for the medal said he led a series of assaults when Marines stormed the island, and was fatally injured while attacking a bomb-proof installation that was hindering the Marine's advance.

A statement on the charity's website said Lt Bonnyman's daughters had decided to have his remains interred at a family plot in Knoxville, Tennessee.

More than 1,000 Americans died at Tarawa, and the entire Japanese garrison of 4,800 was wiped out.

Mr Noah said the remains will be repatriated to the US this month and identified using dental records and DNA.

He added that bodies of several hundred more US soldiers still remain on the island.

"There's a lot of work to be done on the island," he said.

Wednesday 8 July 2015

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/bodies-of-wwii-us-marines-recovered-from-pacific-island/article1-1367024.aspx

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Croatia: Remains Of 19 Serbs Identified

The remains of 19 Serb victims killed during the armed conflict in Croatia 1991-1995 were identified at the Department of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics of the Zagreb University School of Medicine on Tuesday.

The remains were excavated in Slunj, Zadar, Sibenik, Dvor, Gracac, Zitnik, Medari, Vukovar and other locations, reads the statement issued by the Serbian government’s Commission on Missing Persons.

The victims, who were identified through the DNA analysis, will be buried as their families demand, reads the statement.

The remains of a total of 1,053 Serb victims killed in operations Flash and Storm were exhumed from registered graves in the territory of Croatia from 2001 to 2014 and 685 were identified, show the Commission’s data.

Over the last 14 years, the remains of a total of 1,314 Serbs were excavated from mass and individual graves in the territory of Croatia and former Republic of Serb Krajina and 932 of them were identified, says a release the Documentation Informational Center Veritas.

The list of missing persons composed by this NGO includes another 1,871 people of Serb nationality, including 1,315 civilians, 509 of whom are women.

Wednesday 1 July 2017

http://inserbia.info/today/2015/07/croatia-remains-of-19-serbs-identified/

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The Disappeared: work to identify remains begins

Investigators who have uncovered remains in a search for one of the Disappeared say two bodies have been found in a single grave.

The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) initially thought the remains found at a bog in the Republic of Ireland on Thursday were those of Joe Lynskey.

He was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972.

There was "surprise", an investigator said, when another body was found.

Two more of the Disappeared, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, were believed to have been buried close to the site that was being searched in Coghalstown, County Meath. The term the Disappeared refers to victims who were murdered and secretly buried by republicans during the Northern Ireland conflict.

Geoff Knupfer, the head of the ICLVR investigation team, said the "assumption" was that the first body discovered was that of Mr Lynskey.

"But as our archaeologists continued to excavate they found further remains in the grave," Mr Knupfer said.

"Because there are two people in the same grave, clearly there's a distinct possibility that what we have here are the remains of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee. "But that remains to be seen.

"So, we're just saying that we have two victims in the same grave, which fits the profile of the Wright and McKee abduction and murder," he added.

Mr Knupfer also said that an adjoining plot of land had been searched "some years ago" for the bodies of the two men.

While the remains have not yet been identified, Mr McKee's sister Maria said she was feeling a mixture of emotions after being informed that one of the bodies could that of be her brother.

"It's a happy time, but it's also going to be a sad time," Ms McKee said.

"The sad thing about it is my mummy only missed it by three years. On her deathbed she did ask for Kevin.

"It's unreal, it's surreal to us."

Jon Hill, a senior investigator, said that due to the passage of time there could have been confusion among those who had provided information to the ICLVR on the where bodies of the Disappeared had been buried.

"It's so long ago that this happened and this ground where we're searching has changed dramatically from when these events occurred," he said.

Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright were both IRA members who were abducted and murdered by the organisation in 1972.

Mr Lynskey had been a former Cistercian monk from the Beechmount area of west Belfast, and later joined the IRA.

Once the remains have been recovered, they will be taken to Dublin for examination by the state pathologist.

Mr Hill said it would be "some weeks before the DNA can give some more clarity" as to whose bodies had been uncovered.

Maria Lynskey, a niece of Mr Lynskey, had travelled to the site after the initial discovery. null

Joe Lynskey was a former Cistercian monk from west Belfast.

Anne Morgan, the sister of another of the Disappeared, Seamus Ruddy, has been supporting the Lynskey family.

She said Ms Lynskey had "thought the whole day that it was her uncle" who had been found, but has "come to terms" with indications that now may not be the case.

Excavations had started at the bog in March in a search for Mr Lynskey.

Mr Knupford said that if it transpired that his body was not among those that had been found a search of the site would continue.

The ICLVR was set up by the British and Irish governments in 1999 to liaise with former paramilitaries to find the Disappeared.

Any information provided to the commission cannot be used in criminal proceedings.

Over the past 16 years, the ICLVR has searched for 16 people who were officially listed as the Disappeared.

The remains of 10 of the victims have been recovered and formally identified to date.

The most recent confirmed discovery was that of Brendan Megraw, whose remains were found in Oristown bog, also in County Meath, last October.

Saturday 27 June 2015

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33280808#_=_

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First USS Oklahoma remains exhumed

The Defense Department announced in April that the remains of up to nearly 400 unaccounted for service members tied to the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor will be exhumed.

That process began on Monday.

“This was the first set of remains from the USS Oklahoma to be disinterred,” said Jim Horton, the director of the Punchbowl cemetery.

Disinterment ceremonies were held when the bones of Korean War veterans were exhumed for identification. Now, hundreds who served on USS Oklahoma during World War II may also be identified.

The attack happened at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. But many bodies weren’t removed until months later, making it difficult to positively identify the servicemen.

“We will take care of disinterring 65 caskets in 41 grave sites. That is approximately 388 sets of remains,” said Horton.

As each set of remains is removed, special ceremonies will be held at the cemetery.

“We will have full military detail. The coffins are draped with the American flag when they are removed and they are given full military transfer,” added Horton.

The remains will face months of DNA and forensic work, but those who suffered a loss in Pearl Harbor are one step closer to peace.

Friday 12 June 2015

http://kfor.com/2015/06/10/first-uss-oklahoma-remains-exhumed/

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Ghana: Bodies of Goil fire were not handled with dignity says former health chief

A former Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa has expressed disgust at the way the bodies of those who died in the fire at the Goil fuel station at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle were transported to the morgue.

He was of the view that a similar situation in other countries, especially in more developed countries, would have seen the bodies being wrapped in body bags.

“Anywhere else, all the bodies would have been put in body bags and the body bags would have been appropriately transported to the morgue.”

After last Wednesday’s floods and fire outbreak at the Goil Fuel Station, there were pictures and video footages of the dead bodies being put into the bucket of trucks and being transported to the morgues without any covering.

Prof. Badu Akosa told Citi News, the manner in which the bodies were handled was unprofessional and must not be repeated under any circumstances.

He explained that he was “very distressed the way their bodies were just hurled into the bucket of the pick-ups.”

According to him, it did not “in any way dignify the human beings who had lost their lives under such tragic circumstances. I think as a country, we can do better than that.”

Prof. Akosa pointed out that because the incident was a national catastrophe, “the first thing I would have thought that the morgues will do will be that if they do not have a cold room, they will embalm the bodies.”

“This is almost like a certificate of urgency so what you need to do is to preserve each body in as near the state in which it was brought to the morgue as possible even before relations are brought in to identify the bodies.”

He noted that the families of the victims are already apprehensive while getting into the morgue to identify their relatives “so if you expose more than one body to most people, they will not be actually looking at the body they have come to identify.”

“In most cases, you present the bodies in a manner that they can go from body to body to be able to identify.”

Wednesday 10 June 2015

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=361785

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Wooden crosses in the Donetsk steppe: volunteers search for bodies of victims

In the midst of the Donetsk steppe on the mountain stands a wooden cross. Is similar, only much more put on the roads of Ukraine As amulets. On the cross hangs a soldier helmet plywood plate below the faded marker inscription: "Here lie four Ukrainian warriors, which finished it off, then set fire to their And dumped near the road. Buried fifteen. 09. 2014 ".

"Here the locals buried the soldiers of the Ukrainian army. Like the river found them, close to the road, after the battle, " says Victor Fly, the Deputy head of the Union of Afghanistan veterans of Lugansk region.

This organization together with the people's militia LNR AND Ukrainian volunteers of the humanitarian mission "Black Tulip" are engaged in the search, exhumation And transfer of the Kiev bodies of soldiers of the armed forces. Watching all the Commissioners of the OSCE.

"Here are four lies below another. Believe me, this is only a small proportion of all burials, which we send data. We have a lot of bodies are Not even Buried. Parts are collected in the fields, in the debaltseve area, for example", says Victor.

And this cross, And a helmet, And ubiquitous grasshoppers, And all This bathed in afternoon sun Prairie, As if merged. The peace And quiet." As if there is war, " I freeze.

"Don't relax - and chuckled low rebel in a dark green camouflage - you see at the bottom of the river?(Five hundred meters from us flows the Seversky Donets river). It is already the Ukrainian district, snipers, probably in the bushes sat down, holding us at gunpoint ".

"Oh, don't bother with us W OSCE! And volunteers over theirs. Won't shoot.

Tuesday 9 June 2015

http://news.rin.ru/eng/news///113649/

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Perlis migrant mass grave: Post-mortem on human remains in Wang Kelian begins June 7

Come June 7, the health ministry will begin conducting post-mortem on human skeletal remains found at grave sites in Wang Kelian, Perlis.

Minister, Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam said the post-mortem was aimed at determining whether the skeletal remains and those found at human trafficking camps at the Malaysia-Thai border were those of murder victims.

He said for this purpose, the ministry had formed the CSI-DVI (Criminal Scene Investigation-Disaster Victim Identification) and the PM-DVI (Post Mortem-DVI) teams.

"The CSI-DVI has been stationed at the recovery site to help in the process of collecting samples, while the PM-DVI team is at the Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital, Alor Setar to perform the post-mortem on the remains," he said in a media conference here today.

On Monday, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar announced the discovery of 139 graves and 28 transit camps abandoned by a human trafficking syndicate in Wang Kelian, close to the Malaysia-Thai border.

Dr Subramaniam said three post-mortem procedures would be conducted simultaneously to speed up the process of identifying the bodies before samples were sent to the Malaysian Chemistry Department for DNA tests.

He added the post-mortem procedures involved several small teams comprising forensic medical, forensic science, forensic dentistry, radiology and DNA teams.

On the DNA database, Dr Subramaniam said it would be conducted on all bodies found and the data would be kept by the ministry and the police.

"We cannot take the easy way out in the process of identifying the victims. As such, we will be isolating the DNA of each body for reference purposes to facilitate further action towards determining the DNA of the person found in each grave," he said.

The minister said as of last night, 15 body bags had been sent to the Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital morgue.

He said the police had also provided a cold storage container which would enable the hospital to hold more bodies for the post-mortem.

Saturday 30 May 2015

http://english.astroawani.com/malaysia-news/post-mortem-human-remains-wang-kelian-begins-june-7-minister-61091

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Pakistan: First DNA testing lab of Sindh launched

Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah inaugurated the forensic and molecular biology laboratory for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing and Institute of Bio-Medical Technology established by the Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) at a ceremony held at CM House on Thursday.

This is the first DNA lab in Sindh that will help identify bodies and offenders in sexual assault cases and ascertain paternity disputes.

In their respective speeches, officials of the health department and the chief minister called it yet another milestone achieved to curb crime and ensure justice. “This new laboratory, with the help of law enforcement agencies, will solve difficult cases by getting the DNA reports within 72 hours instead of weeks or month as per previous practice,” said Shah.

Recalling the deadly bombing on former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming rally in 2007, the chief minister said that the Pakistan Peoples Party officials ran from pillar to post in an attempt to get the DNA reports of their martyred workers to identify them. The samples were sent to Islamabad and Lahore, but many could not be identified that led to the burial of more than 40 people without getting identified, he lamented.

“During this incident, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto had promised to establish the forensic lab in Sindh,” he said. “We have fulfilled her dream.” He explained that after coming to power, the PPP government assigned the task to the LUMHS, Jamshoro.

According to Shah, the lab will also help the judiciary by using biological specimen such as blood, semen, saliva, urine, hair, teeth and bone for DNA testing, in order to ascertain qualitative and quantitative analyses of the poisons in medico-legal cases.

Friday 24 April 2015

http://tribune.com.pk/story/874886/milestones-first-dna-testing-lab-of-sindh-launched/

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Germanwings flight 9525: 150 DNA profiles isolated

Brice Robin, the Marseilles prosecutor, said forensic scientists have isolated 150 DNA profiles from more than 2,000 samples collected at the crash site. These must now be compared to samples submitted by family members.

But it will take a long time for investigators to match the remains with DNA taken from families of the victims, the Associated Press reported.

More than 2,800 body parts have been found at the crash site, said Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin.

For these results, the investigators had to conduct DNA tests, imaging and 3D scanning all the pieces of the body they found while collecting DNA from the victim items such as jewelry, table cover, razors even the hairs found at the scene.

Saturday 4 April 2015

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/germanwings-disaster-body-parts-150-victims-terrible-accident-have-been-identified-1494826

http://dantri.com.vn/the-gioi/nhan-dien-xong-2800-manh-thi-the-cua-nan-nhan-germanwings-1054770.htm

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Germanwings Flight 4U9525: more on the forensic identification effort

A leading professor who is helping to identify the 600 body parts belonging to the victims of the doomed Germanwings flight says he will be haunted forever by the grim task - as it was revealed the remains of killer co-pilot Andreas Lubitz have already been found.

Professor Michael Tsokos, Germany's most prestigious forensic scientist, said experts are working around the clock to identify the remains of the 150 passengers and crew who were killed when Lubitz deliberately flew the Airbus A320 into the French Alps.

Investigators at the Germanwings crash site have so far retrieved about 600 body parts and have managed to isolate 78 distinct DNA strands from the remains.

Mr Tsokos admitted that Lubitz's remains were among those which had been found and said DNA testing had confirmed the body parts were his. It is hoped his remains may provide clues on any medical treatment he was receiving.

Scientists are now continuing the grim and gruelling task of identifying the rest of the remains which involves photographing and 3D scanning each and every body part.



Police have asked friends and families of the deceased to provide DNA samples and experts hope to match them against the remains and material objects found at the crash site.

Items with vital traces of DNA, such as toothbrushes, razors, jewellery and hair have been collected from the scene and given to scientists at a laboratory in Barcelona. Forensic officers have also been testing samples at a mobile laboratory in Seyne-les-Alpes - the nearest town to the crash site.

It is hoped the findings will provide some clues which will help identify the victims.

Families are also being asked if they can remember what clothes their loved ones were wearing when they boarded the ill-fated flight, in the hope the details could help with the identification process.

They have also been asked about any distinctive marks, such as tattoos, their loves ones might have as well as their dental status and whether they wore dentures.



Mr Tsokos, director of the Institute of legal medicine and forensic sciences, said it is hoped such findings will help identify the remains which will then be cross-examined with the flight's passenger list.

He said each body part would be photographed and scanned in 3D before being placed in a morgue. Once the body has been identified it will be placed in a closed coffin ready for a funeral.

He told German newspaper Bild: 'Radiologists with mobile devices will take CT images of body parts, so as to recognise for example, medically-implanted foreign bodies such as a pacemaker or artificial hip joints.

'Specially trained forensic scientists take [samples] of fingers and palms fingerprints and everything is photographed. 'Every little piece of fabric will be tested on the DNA so that it can be assigned to a particular person.'

He said that within the next three weeks, up to 95 per cent of all victims should be identified. But, he added that it was a haunting task for experts, saying: 'These images will never go out of my head.'

And he said the bodies will strictly be kept in closed coffins because the 'sight of battered corpses can inflict on anyone'. It comes as guards continue to keep 24-hour watch at the crash site, with teams sleeping on the mountainside overnight.



The guards have been on standby at the scene in the province in the southern French Alps since the flight crashed on Tuesday. Philippe Thomy, deputy chief of the High Mountain Gendarmerie, said: 'We sleep next to a cemetery for 150 people.'

Prosecutor Brice Robin revealed today that an access road was currently being built for all-terrain vehicles to reach the site to help with the removal of large parts of the plane.

Mr Robin said the operation could be completed by Monday night, with all body parts and remains being removed from the site within the next seven days.

Sunday 29 March 2015

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3016622/The-hellish-task-identifying-149-victims-600-body-parts-removed-site-emerges-killer-pilot-s-remains-found.html

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