Austria migrant truck tragedy: relatives trying to identify their familymembers

Omar Abd-Mugeeth stared at his TV in Dubai. He felt hot, then sick. Police had found an abandoned refrigerator truck on an Austrian roadside with at least 50 dead aboard.

“ Mahmoud…my little brother. I knew he was one of them,” said Mr. Abd-Mugeeth, a 44-year-old Iraqi who last week traveled nearly 3,000 miles to try to confirm the fate of his brother and his brother’s wife.

Austrian authorities eventually extracted 71 decomposing bodies from the truck last month, one in a string of recent tragedies that has put the migration crisis at the top of Europe’s political agenda. Undertaking risky travel over land and sea has drawn global attention to the desperation of families fleeing war-torn and impoverished lands in the largest mass migration since World War II.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth and other relatives now wait as a lab in the Austrian capital processes DNA samples to find matches with the tissue of victims who would otherwise be nearly impossible to identify. He flew Thursday to Vienna and then drove to meet with police in the Burgenland region, where the truck was found. En route, he stared past cornfields and small medieval-era houses, crying silently. “My mother,” he said, “she is crushed.”

His 29-year-old brother Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth had married Zina Kaylany, 24, shortly after they had met at a wedding five years ago, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. It was love at first sight. “She was a very strong and respected woman,” he said. “Mahmoud adored her.” The couple lived in Baghdad, where his brother’s wife, nicknamed “Light Eyes,” sang for her husband at home.

As Mr. Abd-Mugeeth waited to speak with authorities at the Eisenstadt police station, he asked officers, “How big was the truck? How many meters?” No one could tell him exactly. On a piece of paper, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth drew a square in red ink with small circles inside.

“Seventy one,” he said. “My brother. No space.” Rising suddenly, he stood on one leg, holding his arms up. “This is how he was standing,” he said. Then Mr. Abd-Mugeeth fell back into his chair and rested his head in his hands.

His brother Mahmoud was an Iraqi army officer, a Sunni who had grown fearful that neither he nor his country could protect his wife and family from violent extremists, according to Mr. Abd-Mugeeth and other family members.

Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth researched flights, spoke with friends who had already left and discussed possible routes with his wife, Zina, who had two brothers already living in Germany.

In mid-August, the couple decided to leave. Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth didn’t tell his commanding officers, family members said. They flew out of Baghdad, traveling in a group that included Zina’s sister and a brother. They arrived in Izmir, a city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he asked his brother to stay in Turkey, where other family members lived. But his brother told him his wife and her two siblings wanted to join their brothers in Germany.

“Mahmoud would follow Zina anywhere,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “I tried to talk him into staying in Turkey, I warned him that the trip might be dangerous, that he didn’t know what to expect, but he wouldn’t listen.” Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth planned to start a money transfer and exchange business in Germany, his brother said, similar to the one that Mr. Abd-Mugeeth was running in Dubai.

Before leaving Izmir, the group left their passports with relatives. A smuggler recommended by friends who had already made it to central Europe told them they would get new identities. Many Iraqi migrants are told it is easier to gain asylum in European countries by changing their identities and using, for example, Syrian passports.

Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth also left $10,000 with his older brother, who would transfer the savings when he arrived in Germany.

The group traveled by boat to Greece, where they found another smuggler who drove them by van through Macedonia and Serbia, as far as the border with Hungary. On this leg of the trip, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, he and his mother were in constant contact with Mahmoud through calls and text messages.

‘“In the beginning, he was very happy,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, showing a picture of his smiling brother as he posed at a town on the Greek shore.

As they progressed deeper into Europe, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, his brother no longer smiled in photos he sent. “I could see it in his eyes,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “He had a scared look.”

In one of the last pictures sent, he said, his brother’s face was shaded in a tree’s shadow—behind him, other migrants sat on the ground and talked while others slept amid strewed trash and discarded leftovers.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth last spoke with his brother on Aug. 25—two days before the abandoned truck was discovered by authorities. His brother had told him he was worried about his wife sleeping on the ground in the Serbian forest, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. His brother also confided the couple hadn’t eaten for two days, except for some foraged fruit.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he told his brother to return to their family in Turkey, that there was no point to more suffering. But his brother refused, he said, saying he had spoken to a smuggler who had promised to retrieve them that evening at the Serbia-Hungary border and take them to Germany for €1,800 (about $2,022) a person.

“I should have been harder on him,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “I should never have let him go.”

The group was expected in Germany by the Kaylany brothers—Ahmed, 28, and Sarmad, 25—who were waiting to welcome their sister Zina, her husband, Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth, another sister and a brother, Ali Amer.

Mr. Amer had texted his brothers on Aug. 24, saying the group was waiting at the Serbia-Hungary border for a transport. Don’t worry, he said.

Sitting in their apartment in Aachen, a small town on the border with the Netherlands, the Kaylany brothers said Sunday that they heard nothing for a week after that message. They had tried calling. At first, the phone rang. But after awhile, even the ring tone went silent.

“The world fell apart,” said Ahmed Kaylany, sitting on a green velvet sofa, elbows resting on his knees. “It is as if God chose to take the best people in the world. They wouldn’t even have hurt an ant.”

The two brothers now spend their time waiting—for a decision by German authorities on their asylum applications, filed in May, and for a call from Austrian authorities about the DNA samples they sent out a week ago. For weeks, they have had trouble sleeping and eating.

“The wait is the worst part,” Sarmad Kaylany said, tears in his eyes. “I only think about my family, my parents back home who still have hope…My little sisters, my brother.”

Austrian investigators said working with frustrated and distraught relatives has heightened the emotional challenge for officers working on the case. “We see people doing all they can to provide us with DNA samples, some traveling across half of the world,” a police spokesman said.

Providing relatives with a clear answer is taking much longer than anyone wants, the spokesman said, and it could drag on for several more months because of the forensic complexity of the case, as well as the logistics of communicating with foreign authorities.

“Our priority has to be to not, not ever, make a mistake,” the spokesman said.

Authorities have arrested six people in the case, including the alleged driver.

. At the Eisenstadt police station, an officer arrived to speak with Mr. Abd-Mugeeth. A second man asked him to open his mouth so he could take a swab of saliva. He looked at Mr. Abd-Mugeeth’s passport and wrote down his name, birth date, and address on a form.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth asked when he would get an answer about his DNA sample. “In two to three weeks,” the officer said.

The officer started looking through some papers in front of him, then pulled out a photograph of a head scarf from the stack.

“Have you seen this before?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said.



The officer showed him a picture of a small pouch. Mr. Abd-Mugeeth flicked through the photos his brother had sent on his phone. In one shot, of his brother and his wife in the forest in Serbia, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth saw that she wore the same pouch around her hips.

“And look,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, pointing at his phone. “It’s the head scarf. It’s the same.”

The officer pulled out one last photo that showed a golden necklace with Kurdish letters.

“It’s Zina’s, 100%.” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “The letters say ‘Mahmoud.’ ”

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth asked whether he could see the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law, or at least pictures of them. The officer said he couldn’t until the bodies were identified.

“You would not be able to recognize them,” the officer said. “The bodies are not visually recognizable.”

“But her hair color,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “You must have been able to see her hair color.”

The police officer looked down at the table.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “But no, we couldn’t even recognize her hair color.”

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he had felt as though his brother’s presence lingered after the truck’s discovery. He could see on Facebook that his brother was online for several days after they last talked, a sign his phone must have been in use. But his brother didn’t reply to messages.

When Mr. Abd-Mugeeth called, no one answered.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he was convinced smugglers took away the phone—which police never found—and forced his brother and the others into the truck.

“Mahmoud was very jealous,” he said. “He would not have wanted his wife to be in a place like that with so many men and so little space. He would never have entered that truck without being very scared.”

After the couple had learned early in their marriage that they couldn’t conceive children, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, his brother’s wife offered a divorce so her husband could remarry and have children with someone else.

“He told her he loved her, and that he would always stay with her, with or without children,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “He said…that he would live with her and die with her. And he did.”

Wednesday 30 September 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-month-after-migrant-truck-tragedy-a-grim-wait-1443576982

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Mexico asks Austria lab to test missing students' clothes

Mexican authorities delivered on Tuesday clothing and objects linked to last year's disappearance and presumed massacre of 43 students to an Austrian laboratory in a new bid to identify the victims.

The 53 items were handed over to the University of Innsbruck, which has only managed to confirm the identity of one of the students among 17 sets of charred remains sent by Mexico late last year.

The pieces of clothing and other objects were sent to Austria on a request by international experts of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, which has been conducting its own investigation into a case that caused international outrage.

The items were "reviewed and catalogued" by prosecutors and members of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, the attorney general's office said in a statement.

The Argentine team has worked on the case at the request of relatives of the missing because they do not trust the authorities.

In a July report, the Inter-American commission sharply questioned why prosecutors had not used clothing that was found of the missing students as evidence.

The commission's experts asked the authorities to process the items, photograph them and undertake genetic tests, which were conducted in late July.

Prosecutors say the 43 students were abducted by corrupt police in the southern Guerrero state town of Iguala on Sept 26 and delivered to a drug gang, which slaughtered them and incinerated their bodies.

International human rights groups criticised the government's conclusion, saying it relied too much on the testimony of suspected criminals instead of physical evidence.

Wednesday 2 September 2015

http://www.thesundaily.my/news/1540060

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Nepal earthquake: 5 foreign nationals identified through DNA test

Nepal Police has confirmed the death of five foreigners reported missing in the Great Earthquake based on DNA verification.

The Central Police Forensic Science Laboratory (CPFSL) had conducted DNA profiling of the severed body parts recovered from various parts of the country and cross-matched the details with the DNA reports of the missing foreigners sent by Interpol.

Nepal Police had received DNA reports of 11 foreigners who were reported missing in Nepal by their families in the wake of the April 25 earthquake. The DNA reports that were sent from France, Canada and Spain are being used to match the DNA profiling conducted by the police laboratory of the remains.

Among the identified are three French, a Canadian and a Spanish national.

Police said the DNA profiling report sent to them from concerned nations was done on the basis of items used by these nationals before their departure to Nepal. DNA was extracted from a toothbrush of one of the foreign nationals, while blood stain in the razor was used for another.

The CPFSL conducts DNA profiling through blood, bone and hair with its root, among others. In case of bone, it is drilled and crushed into powdered form. Also, a process known as de-calcification is conducted to remove the calcium content in the bone which is then processed in a machine called the automated express to isolate the DNA.

“Following the isolation, the quantity of extracted DNA is studied which after some other complex processes will eventually lead to genotyping also known as DNA profiling,” said Deputy Superintendent of Police Rakesh Singh. “We had to rely on Indian laboratories for such tests. But since a year, we have been able to conduct the profiling in police laboratory itself. And it has been used extensively after the earthquake to help identify the deceased.”

Similarly, CPFSL were also able to identify additional three dead bodies of foreigners through their fingerprints. The identified people are from Germany, Spain and Britain. In case of the British national, the authorities there were able to produce the fingerprint through his used tea-cup that had remained unattended ever since he left for Nepal. The fingerprint was used to match with the analysis conducted at the police laboratory.

Senior Superintendent of Police Janak Singh, chief of CPFSL said at present DNA and fingerprint analysis of over 40 appendages are underway that will help in identifying the details of the people who died in the earthquake.

Friday 7 August 2015

http://www.ekantipur.com/the-kathmandu-post/2015/08/06/news/5-missing-identified-through-dna-test/279267.html

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Srebrenica women tell tale of loss through objects of memory

Twenty years ago Saturday, Bosnian Serb troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladic carried out Europe's worst carnage since the end of World War II - a massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys that a United Nations court calls a genocide. As Dutch peacekeepers stood helplessly by, the Serbs stormed the Srebrenica safe haven, separating men and boys from women. They drove the males away in trucks and massacred 2,000 on the spot. About 15,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys fled into the woods; the Serbs hunted 6,000 of them down and killed them one by one - some 8,000 in all. The bodies were dumped in mass graves that were bulldozed to hide the evidence, causing remains to be jumbled up into a jigsaw puzzle that has yet to be fully solved. About 1,000 victims remain to be found. Many families have reburied a few bones identified as belonging to their loved-ones through DNA testing.

Two decades later, Srebrenica's women still grieve. Here are some of their stories told through cherished objects.

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HUSBAND'S SHIRT

Fazila Efendic, 64, keeps her husband Hamed's old terracotta-color shirt in the closet. He was 46 when the Bosnian Serb troops shot him dead in the forest. "When I miss him, I open the closet, touch the shirt and I can't say if I feel better or worse then," she says. "But I must touch it." It's the same thing with the school diplomas of her only son Fejzo, who was 20 when he was killed in the Srebrenica massacre. "He won several regional competitions in math and physics. He was a very good child." She showed a white handkerchief with blue stripes that her son gave her before Srebrenica fell. "I carry it around wherever I go," she said. She found the remains of both men years ago and buried them at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, where they lay with nearly 7,000 other victims. She found Hamed in 2003 in one mass grave and Fejzo - or rather two of his leg bones - in 2013 in another.

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HANDFUL OF CLAY

Meva Hodzic takes out a tobacco box, a rusted Swiss knife and a key from a plastic box, and with them fall crumbs of clay. She puts the clay back in the bag, because it's a kind of relic, too: It comes from the mass grave where her husband was found after Serbs killed him in the forest, as he fled carrying the three objects. "It belongs to these items and they should stay together. I was asked to give all this up for a museum of items found in mass graves. But, no," she says "how can I do that if it's the only thing I have left from him?" Mujo ran into the forest with the other Srebrenica men after promising to come back to find her in the purported safe haven that was under Dutch peacekeeper protection. Instead, parts of Mujo's body turned up after the war in three different mass graves. He was put together and identified through DNA analysis. "Besides him I lost two brothers, my father, two sons-in-law and my nephews."

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PICTURE OF SORROW

When Remzija Delic, 58, wakes up in the morning, the first thing she sees on the wall is the picture of her husband Sabit. Then she gets up and looks through the window at the former factory that the United Nations turned into their military headquarters after they declared Srebrenica a safe haven - staring hard at its gate. She goes to the stove and puts the water on boil for her morning coffee. When she returns to the window, she sees her neighbor walking down the street to work, and her face grows dark. She says he was the Bosnian Serb army soldier who separated her husband from her at the factory gate, selecting him to become one of the victims of the massacre. She also lost her father, two brothers and several nephews. As Sabit was trying to board the bus transporting the Srebrenica women to government-held territory, she says, the neighbor grabbed him by the back and yelled: "No. Not you." He pushed him over to the crowd of men chosen for killing, according to Delic. Forensic experts found Sabit, 40, in a mass grave. "You know, all this did not make me hate the Serbs," she says. "There are some wonderful people among them."

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TOBACCO BOX AND FLINT

Djulka Jusupovic, 65, carefully handles a tobacco box made of cans of U.N.-delivered food, along with a piece of flint used to make fire with during the war. After three years of Serb siege, the population ran out of lighters or matches and improvised just like cavemen did. "Someone would make fire with this in his garden in the morning, then everybody would come with a piece of wood to light it and take it home to make a fire," she said, describing life in a town that was on the brink of starvation before the bloodletting began. She keeps the items in several plastic bags. They are still as dirty as they were found when found on her husband, Himzo, as he was excavated from a mass grave. These days she rarely looks at the objects. Each time she takes them out, she remembers what the forensic experts told her when they handed them to her: Himzo, after being shot, may have still been alive when buried.

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HOME-KNIT SWEATER

"Once this sweater was white like snow," says 60-year-old Kadira Gabeljic. "I knitted it myself." She points to it in a picture of the clothes wrapped around her husband's skeleton when forensic experts found him. "Now it's black from the dirt of the mass grave they found him in, and it is torn in the middle from bullets that rattled through his stomach when the Serbs shot him." Her only two children, sons Mesud, 16, and Meho, 21, followed their father Abdulah and the other men fleeing through the woods. All three were hunted down and slaughtered. Her 42-year-old husband and Meho were taken to a warehouse in the nearby village of Kravice and locked inside with another 1,000 other men who were hunted down. Then the Serbs threw hand grenades inside and mowed down the crowd through the windows, until they killed all of them. Forensic experts later found their body parts in four different mass graves. "Actually, they only found parts of Meho," she said. "The head and legs. The middle part is still missing. I buried what I had."

Thursday 9 July 2015

http://www.ksby.com/story/29507535/srebrenica-women-tell-tale-of-loss-through-objects-of-memory

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Valenzuela fire: Relatives identify victims' belongings

The burnt necklaces, watches, and fragments of clothes: these were all that were left behind by the 72 workers killed in the fire that hit Kentex Manufacturing Corporation in Valenzuela City on May 13.

A week since the tragedy, forensics officials are still working to identify 69 of the bodies retrieved from the gutted factory, which left most of the victims burnt beyond recognition.

Aside from DNA testing, the Philippine National Police (PNP) is also asking families to help identify the personal belongings of their loved ones.

During a public assistance event set up by the Valenzuela city government on Wednesday, May 20, investigators also showed photos of the victims' personal belongings found at the accident site.

One by one, tearful relatives stood up to say the burnt watches, rings, and necklaces in the photos belonged to their friends and family members.

Some of the items were difficult to identify, mostly burnt pieces of cloth and shoes that belonged to the victims.

Others were easier to identify: a portion of a courier delivery ticket; an ID with the name still partly legible; one charred photograph of a smiling child.

Looking for a loved one

Irenea Pohanes, 44, was one of the first to stand up when the photos were shown. She had seen, and quickly recognized, the necklace and watch that belonged to her niece, Jerylyn Calago.

Pohanes started to sob when she saw the photos, prompting city social welfare workers to calm her down.

"Nasaktan ako pagkakita ko ng mga alahas niya. Nakita ko na talaga ngang nasunog ang pamangkin ko," she told reporters. "Hindi ko matanggap."

(I was hurt when I saw the photos of her jewelry. I realized that my niece really did burn to death. I can't accept it.)

The 22-year-old Calago had been working in the footwear factory for two years. Her parents both live in Mindanao, leaving Pohanes as her guardian in Manila.

Pohanes said it was the first time that her niece's death had sunk in. She was not able to identify Calago when her body bag was brought in last week.

Together with other families, Pohanes received P83,300 in monetary aid from the Valenzuela city government and other private groups during the public assistance caravan held at the city hall.

But she said the money does little to ease her family's suffering.

"Kahit may pera, wala nang buhay ang pamangkin namin (Even with the money, nothing brings back the life of my niece)," she said.

Helping the families

On Wednesday, the Valenzuela city government set up a one-stop public assistance event to make it easier for families to process the documents they need to claim compensation from the accident.

"We have decided to set up these help desks so that the families would have an easier time in accessing the concerned government offices, because we understand that many of them do not know when and where to start, especially since they are still mourning the loss of their loved ones," Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian said.

Among the participants in the event are the Department of Social Welfare and Development, Department of Labor and Employment, Department of Education, Social Security System, PAGIBIG Fund, Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, Public Attorney's Office, and the offices of Valenzuela Representative Sherwin Gatchalian and Alay Buhay party-list Representative Wes Gatchalian.

The city government said it would also provide livelihood and employment assistance to the workers who lost their jobs at the factory.

20 May 2015

http://www.rappler.com/nation/93814-valenzuela-fire-victims-assistance

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Final coffins from MH17 crash to be brought home to Netherlands

The last seven coffins carrying human remains from the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 will be flown home to the Netherlands today, bringing to an end an on-again off-again search bedevilled by fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists.

A 30-strong team of Dutch, Malaysian and Australian investigators managed to reach the site in eastern Ukraine a week ago. They have since recovered about 50 cubic metres of wreckage, as well as body parts and a large number of personal belongings, including passports, rings and watches.

“We have done everything that is humanly possible,” said team leader, Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, Amsterdam’s police chief. He confirmed that despite snowfalls in the area, they managed to search parts of the site that had previously been too dangerous to reach.

Two unidentified

Mr Aalbersberg said he was “very hopeful” that the body parts would allow forensic experts at a military base in Hilversum to name the final two of the 298 passengers and crew who remain to be identified 10 months after the Boeing 777 was apparently shot down by a Russian-made missile.

By a process of elimination, it is known that those two final victims were Dutch. However, their families still await news of formal identification, which it’s anticipated may now be possible as a result of DNA matches.

The search for remains now officially over, the last seven coffins are due to be flown home to Eindhoven airport on board a C-130 Hercules of the Royal Netherlands Air Force via the “air bridge” to Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine.

When the plane touches down, Operation Bring Them Home – launched in the hours immediately after Flight MH17 disappeared en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17 last year, with the country still in deep shock – will come to its poignant conclusion.

The remains will be greeted on the tarmac at Eindhoven by relatives and friends, as well as by representatives of the government and of the Dutch royal family, and will be given full military honours.

After the Last Post is sounded, they will be transferred in a slow procession, accompanied by police motorcycle outriders, to Hilversum, where the ID work is still going on. Thousands of people are expected to turn out to pay their respects.

Because the wreckage could be crucial to any possible criminal proceedings, it will join previous consignments in a sealed aircraft hangar. There it will be unloaded, photographed, scanned and categorised, before the examination begins.

As much of the jet as possible is being pieced together on a specially constructed frame, although much of the fuselage was badly damaged by fire.

Saturday 2 May 2015

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/final-coffins-from-mh17-crash-to-be-brought-home-to-netherlands-1.2197390

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QZ8501: Five bodies identified through DNA from personal belongings

The East Java Police Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team has identified five more bodies out of the 162 people who were on board the crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 on Saturday.

Kompas.com reported the bodies were identified through DNA samples obtained from the victims’ personal belongings.

“The bodies were identified through DNA obtained from the victims’ personal belongings such as their combs and toothbrushes and not through DNA obtained from their family members.

The method was used because the victims’ DNA during the post-mortem had deteriorated. As such we had to gather antemortem data from their personal belongings,” DVI chief Budiyono told reporters.

To date, 45 out of 51 bodies found have been identified, with nine more still being processed.

AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501 crashed on Dec 28 with 155 passengers and seven crew members on board while en route to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia.

Sunday 18 January 2015

http://english.astroawani.com/news/show/qz8501-five-bodies-identified-through-dna-personal-belongings-28116

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MH17 victims’ belongings recovered from Ukraine crash site

Four Dutch experts and local emergency services made a start on Monday recovering personal belongings from the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in east Ukraine, carting away boxes of personal possessions despite fighting nearby.

But the leader of the Dutch team co-ordinating the repatriation mission said the aim was still to get a Dutch team on site to comb the crash area, despite the fighting between government troops and separatist rebels.

“The State Emergency Services managed to recover many personal belongings, nine boxes of a cubic metre each, from the crash site,” Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, head of the Dutch repatriation mission, said in an interview on Dutch television.

“(There was) jewellery, watches, credit cards, a driving licence, a passport, an iPad, photos - things that really should be with relatives,” he added.

But, he conceded, a Dutch team might not be able to get to the site until spring because the cold weather makes it inaccessible.

“We want to go back to the site. If it's not before the winter, then it's after the winter,” he said.

The experts said they were on hand to advise the local Emergencies Ministry team combing the wreckage in the fields where the Boeing 777 was brought down on July 17, killing all 298 passengers and crew, a Reuters correspondent on the scene said.

Two-thirds of the victims were Dutch nationals and the Dutch Safety Board is leading the investigation.

A short but intense exchange of artillery fire played out near the grassy fields where the team collected items such as books, toothpaste, playing cards, a plastic watch and a stick of antiperspirant. Many items were too charred to identify.

Black smoke rose in the distance less than 5km from the site, despite a ceasefire agreed on September 5 between Ukrainian troops and the pro-Russian separatists they are fighting.

Aalbersberg said the team was able to visit two of the three villages where the plane's wreckage was strewn.

Although ceasefire violations have been sporadic around strategically important locations in east Ukraine, they have led to a decrease in fighting.

Emergency Ministry officials loaded the recovered items on a small cargo truck to be transported from the fields near the village of Hrabove and returned to the victims' families.

Armed pro-Russian rebels stood around the site while workers from the European rights and security watchdog OSCE monitored the recovery process.

The Dutch forensics teams in the Netherlands have identified 272 victims of the crash but additional remains are still believed to be in the area.

Aalbersberg said local emergency services had done a good job recovering passengers' bodies in the days after the crash, despite initial reports of looting.

“These emergency services were different from the large group of people who were there in the first days after the crash. These people did a great job (collecting bodies), also by our standards.”

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Friday he was furious that Dutch investigators had been unable to finish work in the area because of fighting between the separatists and government forces.

Separatists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic fighting to split east Ukraine from Kiev on Monday said 36 civilians, including one child, were killed in shelling of the territory under their control last week.

More than 3 500 people have been killed in the conflict.

The aircraft, which was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, is widely believed to have been hit by a surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-held territory. Kiev blames the incident on the rebels and accuses Moscow of arming them. The rebels and Moscow deny the accusations.

Tuesday 14 October 2014

http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/mh17-victims-belongings-recovered-1.1764586

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Mont Blanc climber finds £205,000 worth of Indian jewels believed to be from plane crash on glacier

It was an unexpected find for the young French alpinist as he approached the summit of Mont Blanc. Poking out of the ice and snow on the shoulder of western Europe's highest mountain was a metal box containing precious gems – including emeralds, rubies and sapphires – worth hundreds of thousands of euros that had lain hidden for about 50 years.

The precious stones, around 100 in total, were neatly packed into sachets, some marked with "Made in India". It soon became clear that the historic haul, which has since been valued by jewellers at up €246,000 (£205,000), had belonged to someone on one of two Air India flights that crashed in 1950 and 1966, killing a total of more than 100 people.

The climber carried the treasure down the mountain and straight to local police. The prefect's office is now contacting Indian authorities to see if it is possible to trace the owner or their relatives.

"You can say the climber who made this find is someone very honest," local gendarme chief Sylvain Merly said.

"He saw very well that what he had in his hands was something very valuable, realising straight away that it was precious stones that had been very carefully wrapped.

"He was a mountaineer, he knew the history of the two plane crashes here and realised that this find was likely linked to those crashes. "Maybe he didn't want to keep something that had belonged to someone who died. So he handed it in."

Merly said the find was made on the Bossons glacier, which had often spewed to the surface "all sorts of remnants" from the Air India crashes. These have included newspapers from the flights, letters, shoes, cables and fragments of the planes, or even human remains.

Last year, two climbers on the glacier discovered a well-preserved bag of Indian diplomatic mail neatly marked "Ministry of External Affairs" that had been on the Boeing 707 flight from Mumbai to New York that crashed near the summit of Mont Blanc on a January morning in 1966 .

That crash killed all 11 crew and 106 passengers, including the pioneer of India's nuclear programme, Homi Jehangir Bhaba. The plane hit the mountain just below the summit after its experienced pilot had radioed confirming everything was okay, and was expected to land at Geneva airport in Switzerland to refuel.

The cause of the crash was never fully established. The mail bag, found 46 years later by a mountain rescue worker and a fellow climber in 2012, was handed back to the Indian government.

In 1950, another Air India flight, a four-motor propeller plane, crashed near the same spot killing 48 passengers and crew as it was expected to land at Geneva.

The prefect's office of Savoie will now contact the Indian authorities to try to return the jewels to the family of the original owner. It is thought that the jewels are more likely to have come from the 1966 crash. The local French paper, the Dauphiné Libéré reported that if an owner is not found, under French law, the jewels could be given back to the climber, who has not been named.

Mont Blanc, hailed as one of the world's most beautiful mountains, also has a deadly history of dangerous storms and fatal avalanches.

Arnaud Christmann, one of the men who found the diplomatic mail last year, warned it could spark a "gold rush".

He said he was worried inexperienced climbers might be tempted to try to seek their fortune on the glacier, which is easy to access but dangerous.

Friday 27 September 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/26/mont-blanc-climber-indian-jewels

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Grieving in the 21st century: Tattoo tributes, mobile memorials and virtual visitations

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" may be the traditional view when it comes to death. But "ashes to tattoos" is one unconventional way people have found to honor their dead, as mourning goes skin-deep, mobile, wearable and virtual this century.

It's all part of new methods of denying the "messiness of the corpse" and "returning" the dead to us, whether by paying tribute through car decals, T-shirts, online memorials or tattoos etched in conventional ink or even mixed with "cremains" -- cremated human remains, says Baylor University scholar and author Candi Cann, Ph.D.

"With 'do-it-yourself' memorials, people are creating their own ways of memorializing the dead, particularly in a more secularized society," said Cann, an assistant professor of religion in Baylor's Honors College. "Some people are alienated from some common traditions such as a long funeral Mass. Cohesive rituals may not be part of their lives."

She made a presentation on "bodiless" memorials at the recent international conference, "Death, Dying and Disposal," of the Association for the Study of Death and Society. Photos of unconventional tributes are in her forthcoming book Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the 21st Century, based on interviews with the bereaved.

Such memorials are "the opposite of what occurs in the religious realm with martyrs and saints, and with relics," she said. "Martyrs and saints bring us closer to holiness and to God through their bodies and narratives of their suffering."

In a secular setting, movies and television shows increasingly dwell on the spectacle of corpses -- everything from a vampire's gory victim to a body on an autopsy table as a pathologist and assistant chat nearby. But when death is up close and personal, mourners are increasingly uncomfortable with the reality of the corpse, Cann says.

Granted, death has never been pretty, and humanity has dealt with that through embalming, purchasing elaborate headstones, and, more recently, embedding ashes in ocean reefs -- or even giving the departed a sendoff with a fireworks display that includes ashes.

But modern-day bodiless memorials are increasingly "returning" the dead to us through visual or virtual "replacements" that are more personal than a memorial in a cemetery or in nature.

With tattoos as tributes, "The idea may seem new, but it's not that far removed from the customs in Victorian England" or the Civil War, when people might wear a lock of a loved one's hair or a photo in a brooch or watch chain, Cann said.

"People simply want to carry the dead with them," she said. "They see a tattoo as forever."

In one photo in Cann's book, a father displays a tattooed likeness of his son's smiling face. The young man, who drowned, had longed during his life for a tattoo of Hawaii; in the image on his father's back, the son sports such a tattoo.

Generally, it's young people who get tattoos to express grief, Cann said. "Often, they choose one of their grandparents that died, because that's their first loss."

To memorialize her grandmother, one young woman opted for a tattoo of a bottle of window cleaner, accompanied by the sentiment "Put some Windex on it" -- a frequent admonition of her grandma.

Then there are tattoos from cremains that are etched into the skin after blending microscopic ash with tattoo ink. Medical experts caution that such tattoos may be risky, and many tattoo artists refuse to do them to avoid legal complications. Some balk at other types of memorial tattoos, too, Cann learned in interviews with them.

"The artist wants to do something personal, yet they also want to do something representative of their work," she said. "They might see flowers or angels as boring or cliché, and that's not how they want their work to be represented."

Other expressions of grief are just as personal, but temporary.

All-black apparel at funerals has long been an expression of grief, but these days, a "mourning T-shirt" may be the deceased person's favorite color. It may display dates of birth and death, an image, and an affectionate nickname.

"A T-shirt also is a way for people who aren't family or allowed time off from work to say, 'I am grieving,'" Cann said.

Car decals, as well as shoe polish or liquid chalk on vehicle windows, are being used to pay tribute to the dead, not just support for causes and sports teams or good wishes for newlyweds.

And while it has long been common to leave teddy bears or erect wooden crosses at the scene of a tragedy, people are becoming more imaginative and personal. One of Cann's photos shows a snow-white "ghost bike," festooned with a maroon Christmas garland and placed at the site of a bicycle accident.

But "the bike is a clean, pristine version - not the one that was mangled," Cann said.

Besides funeral home websites that allow "virtual visitors" to sign guest books, online mourning has evolved to include Facebook's "R.I.P." permanent memorials, as well virtual tombstones, which allow people to use their smartphones to scan headstone codes and launch websites with an interactive life story for those who visit the grave in person or online.

While spontaneous public memorials with flowers and teddy bears sprang up in Newtown, Conn., after the mass murders at a school, as well as after the Boston Marathon bombings and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, "those spaces are becoming smaller in geography and time," with people differing over how much is enough, Cann said.

After the shootings at a theater in Aurora, Colo., memorials were allowed to remain for three months, and then moved to the city's archives for a future public memorial, while in Newtown, they were removed after two weeks, she said.

But when such public memorials are removed, Cann said, they almost invariably return in "the virtual realm . . . The dead will return to haunt us if we do not acknowledge them."

Tuesday 24 September 2013

http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=133098

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Concordia cruise ship righted; search for bodies to begin

The recovery of the two remaining bodies on Costa Concordia will start “in the next few days,” Italy's civil protection commissioner Franco Gabrielli confirmed at a press conference following the successful "parbuckling" operation to right the cruise ship.

Once the half-submerged, but upright wreck has been deemed safe to enter, divers will start the search for the last two bodies of the 32 passengers and crew who perished when the ship struck a rock and foundered off the coast of the Italian island of Giglio.

Gabrielli has already spoken to the Italian Admiral in charge, Stafano Tortora, to approve the search for the bodies of an Italian passenger and a Filipino crewmember.

“We are going to look for these people as soon as possible; I hope this will start in the next few days,” Gabrielli told a packed press conference this morning on Giglio.

“Teams of divers are working on what inspections can be done on the ship. The corridors can now be inspected, and everything inspectable will be carried out by the divers.”

He added: “There will still be areas that that will not be easily accessible. This activity will start as soon as we are comfortable that the ship is safe.”

Divers will also attempt to recover the safe deposit boxes from each of the 1,500 cabins and return anything found to their rightful owners. A spokesman for Costa confirmed that the line would also attempt to return any other belongings found in individual cabins to passengers.

Costa Concordia was successfully righted in a 19-hour operation which concluded in today's early morning hours, before dawn. The ship is now sitting on an artificial seabed in about 100 feet (30 meters) of water.

The extent of the damage on the starboard side is now plainly visible, as is the discoloration of the hull from being immersed for more than 18 months in the sea. The funnel has been removed and only seven of the 13 decks are above water.

However, the ship has remained intact and the next phase of the recovery can now begin.

To prepare it for the region's typically rough winter seas, divers will strengthen the damaged area on the starboard side, add more steel cables to anchor the ship and then attach the ‘sponsons' -– or flotation devices –- to the port side.

Gabrielli emphasized that although the ship was in a much safer position than 12 hours ago, the project was far from over. Costa Concordia is expected to be floated and removed at some point in the spring of 2014.

Tuesday 17 September 2013

http://www.cruisecritic.com/news/news.cfm?ID=5527

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Costa Concordia underwater: What’s inside of wrecked cruise ship?

The nautical blue paint spelling out “Costa Concordia” has almost all bubbled and chipped off the bow of the once luxurious cruise liner after 20 months under salt water off the Italian island of Giglio.

One can get glimpse of just what it’s like in and under the Concordia by the vast array of mesmerizing underwater videos released by Italy’s coast guard and the Titan Micoperi salvage team tasked with removing the rusting hulk.

The seabed is still littered with sun deck chairs that floated from the ship’s balconies and upper deck when it finally came to a rest in January 2012. Fish swim around the sunbed legs and seaweed has grown through some of the mesh seating. The beds are spread out in a surreal scene that looks like a set from an underwater science fiction film. Shoes, mattresses, dinner plates and thousands of pieces of cutlery shimmer in the divers’ lights on a bed of sea grass.

Divers have not been deep inside the massive ship for nearly a year. The salvage divers only work on the outside of the ship and do not have authority to enter the vessel, with the exception of a work area they have created with a false floor on the upper port side deck, unless accompanied by Coast Guard divers.

Not only is the Concordia still chock full of passengers’ possessions the Costa Cruises company hopes to return, but the ship is still considered a crime scene. Thirty-two people died in the accident and the ship’s erstwhile captain, Francesco Schettino, is facing charges of multiple manslaughter and causing the shipwreck after piloting the 290-meter ship into the rocks on Giglio last year.

The last divers to comb through the Concordia’s sunken bowels were there to search in vain for the last two victims, still believed to be trapped somewhere under the ship or buried in a watery grave at the bottom of the hollow hull. The salvage crew believe they know about where the bodies might be found, but there is no guarantee until the ship is lifted whether they will be found at all.

In the weeks after the accident, the divers called the inside of the ship a “toxic stew” of spilled oil, rotting food and floating tableware. There were five massive restaurants on the ship — each one in operation when the ship crashed at 9:42 p.m. on January 13, 2013, spilling tables of buffet food into the water. More than a dozen kitchens and freezers had enough food to feed the 4,200 passengers and crew for a week, plus extra supplies that all cruise ships carry in case of emergencies and delays. Many of the freezers burst and their contents were gobbled up by sea life and the colony of sea gulls that has multiplied on the island since the disaster.

Fishermen off Giglio say that the fish have changed, too. They are much larger and harder to catch after gorging on the ship’s offerings. The freezers that have not burst under the water pressure are still locked with their rotting thawed contents sealed inside. Fridges too, filled with milk, cheese, eggs and vegetables, have been closed tight since the disaster. One has to only imagine leaving a home freezer — a fraction of the size of the industrial freezers used by cruise ships — unplugged for 20 months to get an idea of the type of rancid mess trapped inside.

Rodolfo Raiteri, head of the Coast Guard dive team, told CNN that his divers had to confront an array of deep-sea threats, from floating knives to lethal bed sheets and flowing curtains that could have easily become entangled in the divers’ safety cords. There were also floating chairs and large chunks of marble and crystal chandeliers that constantly detached and fell from the sideways ship’s ceilings every time the ship creaked and shifted as it settled onto two underwater rocky mountain peaks. All that debris, along with thousands of dinner plates, can be seen stacked against the underwater windows in some of the salvage video.

The ship has compressed three full meters in the 20 months since it crashed, and each time it groans and twists, windows break as their frames adjust and once-attached items are lodged free. On cruise ships, dining room tables are all affixed to the floors to keep passengers from chasing sliding tables in rough seas. Raiteri described the bizarre scene his divers faced swimming among the sideways tables, sometimes encountering plates of food and floating champagne bottles in their search for victims.

Senior cabin service director Manrico Giampedroni, one of the last survivors to be pulled out of the wreckage alive, became trapped half submerged in the ship’s dining room when his leg got caught among fallen furniture. He survived for 36 hours on floating food and stayed awake by drinking caffeinated beverages until rescuers found him. If he had fallen asleep, he would have drowned. Incidentally, Giampedroni was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in a plea bargain for his role in the deaths for not being at his duty station to help evacuate the ship.

In addition to the general rule of thumb that you don’t blow up ships where there are still unrecovered victims, one of the main reasons the Concordia is being refloated rather than blown up or dismantled on site is because of the toxins and personal effects still trapped in the ship’s 1,500 staterooms. The ship’s engines are still thick with lubricants and the kitchens are still filled with cooking oils and non-soluble materials that would pollute the sea.

Giglio, which lies within the Pelagos Sanctuary, the largest protected marine wildlife park in the Mediterranean, is flush with exotic sea life and coral reefs. The putrid stew inside the ship’s 17 deck-structure will eventually have to be purified or pumped out before the ship is refloated sometime next year, and the personal effects are another matter.

All that was in the Concordia the moment it wrecked is presumably still there, save the ship’s bell, which mysteriously disappeared two months after the wreck based on surveillance video taken by authorized divers. An investigation into who could have stolen the bell has caused some concern that other items, especially high price items from the ship’s gift shops, could have also been pilfered. Everything inside the ship is expected to be recovered and returned to its original owners, no matter how water-logged it may be, but that could be months from now when the ship is eventually towed and dry docked for dismantling.

Each of the cabins has a locked safe, presumably still filled with passengers’ valuables including cash and jewelry. There are also countless cameras, laptops, iPads and cellphones that passengers left behind, not to mention luggage. The ship had only been at sail for three hours, so many passengers likely didn’t take time to unpack, but instead headed to the nearest dining room or bar to relax as the ship set sail. One suitcase floated to the nearby island of Elba and its soggy contents were delivered to the owner nine months after the disaster. Many more suitcases have been spotted by divers at the bottom of the sea.

Nick Sloane, the head of the salvage operation for Titan Micoperi, the joint American-Italian venture to rescue the Concordia,, says that if explosives were used, the ship’s smaller contents would become dangerous projectiles. “Mattresses and passports would scatter the sea,” he says. But the real danger would be flying cutlery, cooking knives, bottles and broken glass.

If the “parbuckling” goes well and the giant 114,000-ton vessel is tipped upright sometime in the next week, much more than the 65 percent of the ship that is under water now will be submerged. The platforms that will provide a base on which the Concordia will rest are some 30 meters below the sea level, meaning many of the staterooms that were dry until now will sink underwater. Some of the toxic water will be displaced and pushed out of the upper cabins. Some freezers that are still sealed could burst under new water pressure. And almost every window on the ship’s outer cabins is expected to break as the ship’s frame twists.

Sloane says the noise will be deafening as metal twists and windows pop. The ship has been rigged with cameras and microphones to help the salvage crew monitor the ship’s structure as it is lifted. As Sloane says, ships this size were never meant to lie on their sides, and they are not built to be lifted. The salvage team says they will be able to contain any spillage of toxins with oil booms now in place around the work site. The broken glass and new debris will join what is already at the bottom of the sea.

There will never be the scale of environmental disaster that was already averted by removing the ship’s 2,400 tons of fuel shortly after the ship crashed, but there are still major risks involved with salvaging the Concordia. If the parbuckling fails and the ship breaks apart as it is rotated, the rotten contents — moldy mattresses, passports, toxic stew and all — will spill into the once-pristine sea. And even if it succeeds, this part of the Mediterranean will never be quite the same again.

Monday 16 September 2013

http://fox2now.com/2013/09/15/costa-concordia-underwater-whats-inside-of-wrecked-cruise-ship/

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Veterans revisiting battlegrounds of the Vietnam War to help reunite the families of fallen Viet Cong with personal effects

Ben Roberts-Smith knows how it feels to go to war.

But a trip to Vietnam with a group of veterans showed him a side of war he had never experienced.

"It was amazing to see these guys who were shooting at each other 40 years ago and are now able to sit down and have a beer together," he said.

"I can't imagine being able to do that."

Cpl Roberts-Smith, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery in Afghanistan, spent four days revisiting battlegrounds of the Vietnam War and helping reunite the families of fallen Viet Cong with items taken from soldiers' bodies at the time.

Of all the items that were returned, some of which have spent decades tucked away in small military museums, one stuck in Cpl Roberts-Smith's mind.

"It was a picture a Vietnamese soldier had drawn of his wife and on the back of the picture he had written the names of his children," he said.

"When we went back his wife was still alive.

"To be able to give that back to her and see what it meant to her . . . she was overcome with emotion. You can only imagine what that's like.

"It was extremely emotional for them (the Australian veterans) at the point of handing back items to the families." "

The trip, dubbed Operation Wandering Souls, was the work of military researchers at the University of NSW, including Vietnam War veterans.

As well as collecting personal effects to return to the families of lost Viet Cong soldiers, the team has compiled a database of burial sites to help find those Vietnamese still deemed missing in action.

The project was deemed particularly important in part because Vietnamese culture considers those who die in unrecorded graves to be "wandering souls". The personal belongings of someone who has died also have significance.

Vietnam has previously helped Australia find and repatriate its dead soldiers.

Cpl Roberts-Smith said he jumped at the chance to visit.

"To be able to go and see the battlefields was fantastic," he said. "To be able to go with those Vietnamese veterans was a once in a lifetime experience.

"It was a humbling experience to see what it meant to them. I know that feeling, I know why they did what they did.

"From an Aussie point-of-view or a soldier point-of-view I think it was important to go back and pay my respects to the men who lost their lives there."

Sunday 15 September 2013

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/18937807/vietnam-visit-humbles-hero/

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Mexican officials identify bodies of all 12 kidnap victims

Mexican authorities have confirmed that 12 bodies pulled from a mass grave last week belong to young people kidnapped from a Mexico City bar in May, an official said.

A 13th body was recovered from the grave outside the capital but officials have not indicated whom it might be.

Seven young men and five women ranging between 16 and 34 years of age were reported missing in the days after the group went to the bar in the Zona Rosa district on 26 May.

Surveillance footage showed some of them being led to cars outside the after-hours bar.

There was no obvious sign of force on the surveillance footage. The men who took them away were not masked and did not seem to be carrying weapons.

There was no trace of the missing people until their bodies were discovered in a grave covered with lime, cement and asbestos on the outskirts of Mexico City.

An official from the federal attorney general's office said the bodies were identified through DNA testing and other means.

The office said in a statement that the remains were handed over to the city prosecutors, who are leading the investigation.

But some relatives of the victims said they were shown clothing found at the grave but that they did not belong to their loved ones.

"The clothes they showed us don't belong to any of the kids," Leticia Ponce, mother of 16-year-old Jerzy Ortiz, told AFP.

The families refused to take the bodies because they first want independent forensic experts from Argentina to examine the remains.

The brazen mass killing has tarnished the capital's image as an oasis from the drug-related murders and kidnappings that have plagued the country in recent years.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in drug violence since 2006.

Official figures say 26,000 people have gone missing across Mexico since December 2006, when the army was deployed to fight crime gangs.

Amnesty International has accused the Mexican government was not doing enough to investigate the disappearances of thousands of people.

Wednesday 28 August 2013

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/18690441/mexican-officials-identify-bodies-of-12-kidnap-victims/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23840046

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Belongings of victims accurately recorded

Cash bills wrapped in plastic turned up in the oil-soaked clothes of a woman, one of the fatalities of the sunken MV St. Thomas Aquinas.

The clothes were being washed by Charles Tubio, a criminology intern, one of 76 assigned since Tuesday to help in the ongoing victim identification process at the Cosmopolitan Funeral Homes.

Tubio turned over the bills, which ran to several thousand pesos, to the head of the Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO).

“I pity the victim who died,” the intern told Cebu Daily News, when asked about the discovery.

He said the woman, who remains unidentified, reminded him of a student who travels at sea bringing her tuition fee money in her pocket.

The clothes or any jewelry, personal effects or even body tattoos or scars are sometimes the only clues to the identity of unclaimed bodies recovered at sea after the Aug. 16 sea tragedy.

Senior Supt. Nestor Sator, regional chief of the PNP Crime Laboratory, said each item is documented and safeguarded.

When a cadaver is brought to the funeral home, crime lab personnel tag the body, place the human remains in a body bag which is also tagged, and take photographs. Another tag is placed on on the plastic bag holding the belongings of the victim – apparel, gadgets, jewelry, etc.

All items are documented in the presence of the Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) and Cosmopolitan staff before they are turned over to the evidence custodian.

Sator said fingerprint and dental examination are made as the main source of information in the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) process.

DNA testing is used as a last resort if families are unable to produce dental records of their loved ones or fingerprint records from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) or police clearances .

The student interns who help out belong to the graduating class. Part of their duties is to tape numbers on the hands of cadavers so the victims can be easily located once they are identified by the families.

The bodies are bloated and face features are unrecognizable after days in the water.

“We pray before we head to work for the eternal rest of their souls,” said one of the interns.

Intern Concepcion Avenido said that last Tuesday, after she helped SOCO, she skipped lunch and dinner and she could hardly sleep at night.

“After the hands-on experience, we had a hard time eating our meals because the smell of the dead clings to our nostrils and body,” she said.

Nevertheless, the interns said the experience makes them count their blessing that their own families are safe.

Last Tuesday, SOCO allowed the public viewing of a slideshow of photos of the recovered victims and their belongings in the lobby of the funeral home to speed up identification of the victims by their families.

However, this was stopped on Thursday after the Department of Health advised that it was traumatic for the families to see deformed faces and bodies of their kin.



With this, Chief Inspector Benjamin Lara of the PNP Crime Laboratory -7, changed the procedure and showed only personal belongings of the victims like clothing one by one to the families.

“We stopped the viewing because it adds to the families’ trauma. Viewing only prolongs their agony,” Lara said.

This time, staff conduct interviews and ask families to describe in detail their missing loved one as well as their belongings to avoid spurious claimants.

DNA tests are done in Camp Crame in Metro Manila and would take months.

“The relatives should understand the sheer volume of the specimens taken from the victims and the sheer volume of specimens taken from the relatives. Take note, there are more than 80 relatives who are looking for their missing loved ones,” Lara said.

Saturday 24 August 2013

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/473463/belongings-of-victims-accurately-recorded

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Tribunal delays return of Srebrenica victims’ belongings

Damir Alic, lawyer for the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacres, says he fears that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, will not hand over the stored items of victims that were found in mass graves any time soon.

Alic, who represents the victims together with a team of lawyers, recalled to BIRN that last October they asked the United Nations to abolish the immunity from prosecution of Carla del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal, so she could be prosecuted over the destruction of items found in the mass graves.

Several years ago, the lawyers launched an investigation regarding the destroyed items, which showed that about 1,000 items found in the graves were destroyed in 2005 and 2006.

They hold del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the tribunal from 1999 to 2007, responsible for this action.

“We collected a lot of evidence that points out exactly to del Ponte and the persons around her,” Alic said.

However, since the ICTY clearly did not want to process del Ponte over the matter, the lawyers last October asked the UN to remove her immunity and so allow her prosecution.

Prosecution remains highly unlikely. Just over six months ago, the UN appointed her as lead investigator into the civil war in Syria.

Meanwhile, Alic recalled, the Hague Prosecution has said that the preserved items of the victims will not be returned to Bosnia until the war crime trials are not completed.

“We want this resolved as soon as possible, rather than in 2015 or 2017,” he said.

According to him, Serge Brammertz, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, promised to submit photographs of the preserved items, such as glasses, ID's or parts of clothing, to be placed in the Memorial Center in Potocari so that the families can start the process of identification.

“He promised last year that he would send high-resolution photographs that could be used for identification, to determine what belong to whom,” Alic said.

“But we did not get these photos. It is obvious that this is down to the bureaucratic slowness in The Hague Tribunal and for these reasons we are not satisfied,” he added.

Alic maintains that about 90 per cent the preserved items should be classed as personal, and it is essential that they be returned.

Lawyers representing the victims of Srebrenica and Brammertz have different opinions over whether some items - such as the bandages used to tie the hand and cover the eyes of the victims before they were killed - are personal belongings.

“In our interpretation, the bandages used for the hands and eyes [of victims] are also private property,” he said.

“These items were found in mass graves. However, Brammertz’s stance is that bandages used specifically for eyes cannot be called private property,” Alic said.

The matter of seeking the removal of del Ponte’s immunity continues.

“Till now, we have no more information about what is happening within the UN. We know it is going very slowly,” Alic said.

“However, we have unofficially learned that the Department of Legal Affairs is in the phase of preparing a case.

“So, we assume that the commission that should investigate all the actions undertaken by del Ponte since artefacts from the Srebrenica victims were destroyed will be formed soon,” he said.

Alic added that the liability of other employees of the Hague Tribunal would also be investigated.

“We will seek to establish the responsibility of other persons who still work at The Hague Tribunal for the destroyed artefacts,” Alic said.

Thursday 22 August 2013

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/interview-tribunal-delays-return-of-srebrenica-victims-belongings

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Jewelry, rubber bands used to identify dead

One of the women killed in flash floods and landslides in the Indian Himalayas last month was found clutching a thin rubber band with a few safety pins.

Police are using these items to help identify the woman, aged 55-60. Her body was found near Kedarnath Temple, a pilgrimage site in Uttarakhand and one of the places hardest hit by the mid-June floods.

Investigators are trying to identify nearly 200 bodies recovered from the floods. State government officials Monday said more than 5,700 people are still missing. Search and rescue operations are continuing but the missing are presumed dead.

Bodies that have been recovered have been cremated, because of lack of adequate storage, but police hope personal belongings, mostly jewelry, could provide clues about their identity. DNA samples were collected before bodies were burnt, Shashidhar Reddy, vice-chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, told a news conference Monday.

Nilesh Anand Bharne, superintendent of police at Uttarakhand’s disaster management division, said valuables removed from the bodies of the deceased will be handed over to family members once they are identified.

Any that remain will be kept by the police for records, he added. “There’s been so much devastation. In some cases, bodies have been buried under buildings and debris and are unidentifiable,” he said. “In these cases, their ornaments and personal belongings are the way for family members to identify them.”

A new list of unidentified bodies is put online every two days, replacing previous lists.

The latest list has 18 individuals; nine men, eight women and one 12-14 year-old boy. He was about four feet 10 inches tall, had black hair and a very thin body, police said. He was found wearing a blue jacket and yellow sweater over black jeans and a blue nylon belt.

Another entry shows a photograph of two pink bracelets, a couple of rings and a black and gold nose stud. The items belonged to a female in her mid-to-late fifties who was around five foot three inches tall, according to the police. She was wearing a red sweater with white and blue stripes and a sky blue petticoat. Her body was also recovered from Kedarnath.

According to Mr. Bharne, 63 people from the overall list of 192 bodies have been identified. It was unclear how many of these identifications were a result of the list of personal effects and information on the state police website.

Tuesday 16 July 2013

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/07/16/jewelry-rubber-bands-used-to-identify-dead/

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How a rusty key found next to human remains unlocked identity of man who went missing 14 years ago

Not DVI, but still a fine piece of detective work worth reporting here..

The body of a missing man who had not been seen for 14 years has been identified - thanks to a rusty key.

A dog walker found human bones and a shoulder bag in February last year but police initially had no idea who the man was.

Crime scene investigators then analysed the contents of the bag and discovered a pair of reading glasses missing both lenses, a wrist watch... and the old key.

And when they scrubbed the key with solvent, it revealed a serial number.


Police linked the number to a house in Battersea, south-west London, and discovered a missing man - Carl Johnston - had links to the address and also Burpham, West Sussex, where the bones were found.

Officers from Sussex Police tracked down his family, who confirmed they had not seen him since 1999.

The body was subsequently identified - bringing an end to 14 years of uncertainty - and an inquest recorded an open verdict. Mr Johnston would have been 67 when he passed away.

Writing about the investigation on his blog, CSI officer Chris Gee said the investigation, which he carried out with colleague DC Alison Hoad, was like a 'jigsaw puzzle'.

He said: 'The bag was in close proximity to the bones, with a high potential the two were related.

'The forensic service provider performed a basic DNA comparison with the deceased’s relative, and came to the conclusion that there was a 1 in 40 chance of them being related.

'During the post-mortem at the beginning of the investigation, the forensic anthropologist gave an indication towards the age the person was when they died but no cause of death could be determined.

'The coroner was happy that no further work was needed and accepted this identity.

'We at Sussex Police strive to help and bring closure to families who need it.

'DC Hoad set a fantastic example of how persistence and attention to the finer detail can really pay off.

'Everyone else had overlooked the keys, but our two minds made this cold case heat up.

'I’m really pleased we could present our findings to the family and offer them their relative back, someone they had lost for so long.'

Thursday 11 July 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2359485/Carl-Johnstons-body-identified-Burpham-West-Sussex-14-years.html

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Victims’ jewellery missing, shrine donation boxes empty

As the unprecedented rains turned Kedarnath into a ghost town with bodies strewn all over, a ‘gold rush’ in the holy town is sending shivers down the spine.

Cash and gold offerings at the shrine are missing and so is personal jewellery, including anklets and gold bangles, of several of the deceased. In some cases, fingers have been chopped off to remove rings. The local police have arrested some persons who tried to flee with the cash.

According to reports, bodies are being disfigured by looters who are out to make a quick buck before the administration reaches those far flung areas.

Gurgaon resident Narender Yadav, who managed to return home on his own after being trapped at Rudraprayag, has come with a video that he managed to shoot using his mobile phone. The video shows miscreants removing gold jewellery from dead bodies using screwdrivers and pliers.

“Chop off the hand, if you can’t remove the bangle,” a voice is heard instructing a youth trying to remove a gold bangle from a female dead body.

“It was horror. The locals have been indulging in rampant looting and mistreating the dead for gold, cash and valuables. They [also] strike at those alive and moving alone, asking them to handover their gold, cash, watches, etc and threatening that they would be pushed to the gorge,” Yadav said.

He had gone to Uttarakhand for pilgrimage with his friends and relatives, five of whom are still missing.

A teenage girl broke into tears while describing what she saw.

“They look like Nepalis and are using sharp knives to cut ears and noses to remove gold from dead bodies. How low can one stoop for greed? Instead of helping the victims they are looting them,” she said sobbing.

Some of those rescued said that the army had caught some young boys with bags full of looted gold and jewellery.

There are reports that locals are charging as much as Rs500 for a bowl of rice (Dh30) and Rs180 for a piece of roti from hungry victims yet to be rescued. Local taxis are demanding up to Rs25,000 to drive the victims to the state capital Dehradun. All agencies working on the ground have confirmed the shameless ‘gold rush’.

Pilots of the Army Aviation wing and the Indian Air Force have reported people refusing evacuation to make a ‘quick buck’ off the dead.

Special Forces of the Indian Army, which have been looking for survivors, have tried to warn the human scavengers, but to no avail.

DIG Amit Prasad of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), which has also sent its rescue teams, confirmed tell-tale signs of scavengers. “Donation boxes at Kedarnath have been broken into and emptied. We have informed the local police,” he said.

The local police’s Division Range DIG AK Sinha confirmed that a man in the robes of a sadhu was nabbed with Rs 87 lakh belonging to the State Bank of India’s branch at Kedarnath. Another man was caught with Rs 83 lakh while others have been caught with smaller sums and gold ornaments. The temple, managed by the Sri Badrinath-Kedranath Temple Committee, opens in April-May for summer depending upon an auspicious time carefully calculated by the religious men. It is during this period that the idol of Lord Shiva is installed in the shrine. In winter, it is taken down and installed at Ukhimath. This year, the Kedarnath shrine opened on May 14 and Badrinath on May 16. The shrine usually remains open till November, but the number of devotees decreases in the monsoon.

Collections run into crores each year and nearly Rs 9-Rs 10 crore is declared each year. Apart from cash, devotees offer gold as well. As this was the peak season owing to summer vacations, donations to the shrine were bound to be high. The cast iron collection boxes are usually emptied under tight security and the contents deposited in the bank. Divisional Commissioner, Garhwal Division, Subhardhan said, “Thieves have been making attempts. The local district magistrate is a member of the temple committee, but he does not enjoy administrative control over it.”

As estimated, 10,000 pilgrims were at Kedarnath when catastrophe struck. Lakshman Singh, an ITBP assistant sub-inspector and eyewitness, said, “There were 10,000-12,000 persons at the shrine when the catastrophe struck on June 16. With the administration is yet to arrive at a death toll, it is anybody’s guess what thieves have fled with in terms of gold jewellery.”

KEDARNATH’S TALES OF GREED

- DIG Amit Prasad of the ITBP said donation boxes at Kedarnath have been broken into and emptied

- The local police’s Division Range DIG AK Sinha confirmed that a man in the robes of a sadhu was nabbed with Rs 87 lakh belonging to the SBI’s Kedarnath branch

- Another man was caught with Rs 83 lakh while others have been caught with smaller sums and gold ornaments

- Jewellery, including anklets and gold bangles, of several of the deceased is missing; in some cases, fingers have been chopped off to remove rings

Tuesday 25 June 2013

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/india/they-won-t-spare-even-the-dead-1.1201440

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130625/main3.htm

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Wedding ring, IDs, other personal effects brought out of ‘Princess’ ferry wreck

A gold wedding ring was among personal effects found Friday by divers who went down into the wreckage of the Princess of the Stars in the hopes of locating the remains of about 400 passengers believed still trapped inside the ship that sank off Sibuyan Island five years ago.

Engraved on the ring the name Farah and what forensic investigators believed to be a wedding date: 10-6-07. It came from a bag that also contained a passport and other belongings of one Marlon Guinitaran from Balingasag, Misamis Oriental.

Also recovered was a plastic folder that contained the certificates awarded by the Far East Maritime Foundation in Cebu City to a seaman named Domino Omega.

In another bag were passbooks and documents of a Sgt. Rupert Tan of the Philippine Army.

There was also a school ID of a Mary Jane B. Sabuero of the Northern Mindanao School of Fisheries from a bag that contained a woman’s shirts and denim pants, now in tatters.

“These only strengthen our hopes of recovering the hundreds of bodies still down there,” said Persida Acosta, chief of the Public Attorney’s Office who arrived here Friday with a team of forensic experts to inspect the personal effects recovered from the wreckage of the Princess of the Stars.

The divers failed, however, on Friday to cut open the cabins of the ship where hundreds of bodies were believed to be trapped. The Cebu-bound Princess of the Stars, owned by Suplicio Lines, capsized and sank at the height of Typhoon Frank on June 21, 2008.

Of the 860 people on board, only 52 survived, says a memorial marker erected on the shore of Sitio Cabitangahan in Barangay Taclobo here.

It says 312 bodies were found during the initial years of recovery. Acosta said around 400 remained missing.

The ship’s hull, which was visible above the water until 2011, was removed, leaving the remaining half of the ship, composed of the four passenger and crew decks, 100 feet deep down the sea and 500 meters from the shore.

“We are now on the second phase (of the recovery),” said project engineer Vener Balsamo, who is working for the salvaging company, Hi-cap Metal Trading.

Royal Jessan was the original salvor until it sold the project to Hi-cap Metal Trading sometime in 2012.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” said Balsamo of pulling bodies out of the cabins. He cited the danger of being trapped inside the wreck, with the structure already weakened by rust.

The weather is also a factor, which allowed retrieval operations in 2012 to go on for only two months.

Balsamo said they planned to cut open each cabin, a process that might take them three to five years.

“We don’t mind how long. We will not stop looking for them. All we want is to give them a decent burial,” said Estella Jeli, 36. Jeli, who is from Imus City in Cavite, lost her parents and three siblings in the sea tragedy. She came here with the PAO, hoping to find her still missing two siblings, Jonil and Jackie Laurel, who were 17 and 7 years old when the ship sank.

“Our objective in retrieving these personal effects is to identify the passengers who were not on the ship’s manifesto and to check the manifesto itself. These are pieces of evidence to prove these people were on board the ship,” said PAO forensic doctor Erwin Erfe.

Acosta vowed her office would not stop monitoring the retrieval of the bodies until the shipwreck is totally removed from Romblon.

Rodne Galicha, director of the non-governmental group Sibuyan Island Sentinels League for Environment, called on the national government to step in and help speed up the recovery, citing danger from solid wastes like shampoo, bath soaps, and even infant diapers in cargo trucks that are still inside the shipwreck.

Besides that, Galicha said, “no one deserves to be buried in the ocean. As Chief Acosta has always said, the victims deserved a decent burial.”

Saturday 15 June 2013

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/426951/wedding-ring-ids-other-personal-effects-brought-out-of-princess-wreck

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