Rescuers race to reach cut-off communities with many missing from Typhoon Haiyan

Rescue workers in the Philippines were on Monday engaged in a desperate struggle to reach areas devastated by 'Super' Typhoon Haiyan, amid fears the estimated death toll of 10,000 people could rise even further.

Even in a country inured to natural disasters, the sheer scale of the destruction wrought by ‘Super’ Typhoon Haiyan has left everyone from the estimated 9.5 million people affected by the storm, to the government and aid agencies, reeling in shock.

“Absolute bedlam” is how the Chairman of the Philippines Red Cross Richard Gordon described the situation in Tacloban City. The worst-hit area so far reached, Tacloban is where the majority of the 10,000 people believed killed are thought to have perished.

“There are an awful lot of dead people all over the place,” said Mr Gordon.

Three days after Haiyan sent tsunami-like, five metre-high waves crashing into Tacloban, destroying virtually every building in the city, corpses of both people and animals litter the streets.

Food, water and medicine are in desperately short supply and shocked survivors wander the city begging for food and water from anyone who might have it.

As the stench of rotting, bloated bodies floats through the air, the chances of disease spreading through the city’s surviving population increase by the hour.

The International Red Cross said the figure of 10,000 deaths is “realistic”. Now, the Philippines media is calling Haiyan the worst disaster to have ever hit their country of more than seven thousand separate islands.

Widespread looting and disorder in Tacloban, as starving and homeless people search for food and water, has only added to the difficulties being experienced by the authorities and aid agencies.

“The unstable security situation is a clear indication of the desperation on the ground,” Marie Madamba-Nunez, Oxfam’s spokesperson in Manila, told the Telegraph. “There have been reports of people attacking relief convoys and even helicopters are not being spared.”

With so many remote communities still cut-off from the outside world, there are real fears that the final death toll will be far higher.

Only now are the first relief teams arriving in eastern Samar province, the first place in the central Philippines to experience the full force of Haiyan’s fearsome winds and raging floods.

Estimates of the dead on Samar are already in the hundreds and thousands more are missing.

“Access has been very difficult and it’s only today that we have managed to get a team into Borongan in eastern Samar. A helicopter was able to land them,” said Mrs Madamba-Nunez.

But the coastal town of Guiuan, where Haiyan first made landfall on Friday, remains completely isolated.

Aerial footage has revealed that much of the town of 40,000 people has been flattened, raising the grim prospect that the number of dead there may match that of the destroyed city of Tacloban.

“The roads are completely impassable and there is no contact with the town, so I believe the navy will have to try and reach Guiuan,” said Mrs Madamba-Nunez.

Other severely-affected areas in the Visayas island group to the west of Tacloban and Samar are also still unreached.

“We’re still unable to get through to Roxas City. The water on the roads is hip-high and electrical posts and trees are across all the roads,” Kendra Clegg, one of a four-person UN disaster and assessment team on Panay Island in the Visayas, told the Telegraph.

The mood of the survivors too, is becoming darker. “Some people are complaining about the lack of supplies,” said Ms Clegg. “People are definitely more sullen than they were yesterday.”

Over 630,000 people have been displaced by Haiyan, and are camping out in makeshift evacuation centres, or simply sleeping in the open.

“98 per cent of the houses are destroyed in parts of northern Cebu Island, but the main problem is the lack of water,” said Tata Abella, an Oxfam worker in the town of Daanbantayan on Cebu’s far northern tip.

“People are drinking from secondary sources like wells, but these are not really safe so there’s a real risk of people falling ill.”

More than anything, the huge calamity in Tacloban means that far fewer resources are reaching the other regions devastated by Haiyan.

“The destruction in Tacloban is appalling,” said the UN’s Ms Clegg, “but it’s overshadowing the other places that were hit by the typhoon.”

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/10440265/Rescuers-race-to-reach-cut-off-communities-with-tens-of-thousands-still-missing-from-Typhoon-Haiyan.html

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Storms kills 100 in Somalia's Puntland, more missing

At least 100 people were killed over the weekend when a tropical cyclone hit Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region, President Abdirahman Mohamud Farole said on Monday, appealing for help from aid agencies.

"A heavy storm hit Bandarbeyle and Eyl towns on Saturday and Sunday. About a hundred people died. Hundreds of houses and livestock were swept by the floods into the ocean," Farole told reporters in the capital Garowe.

"We urge United Nations aid agencies to assist the victims. As Puntland, we have established a committee to investigate the loss and damage. Electricity, communication and fishing boats were all destroyed."

The government of Puntland said in a statement that hundreds of people remained unaccounted for and declared a natural disaster emergency.

Puntland spans the relatively calm north of Somalia and has largely escaped the worst of Somalia's upheaval of the last 20 years. Foreign powers advocating a loose federal political system in Somalia have held it up as a possible model.

The area is rich in energy resources and is being sized up by oil explorers. However, Puntland's authorities have said insecurity is growing, and blame the Islamist al Shabaab militia, which has been driven out of many regions that it used to control in the remainder of Somalia.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/11/uk-somalia-storm-puntland-idUKBRE9AA0KD20131111

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Bodies of trapped miners found in NCotabato

Rescuers recovered on Sunday the cadavers of six missing illegal gold miners buried alive in a tunnel in Magpet, North Cotabato that collapsed due to heavy rains over the weekend.

The victims were digging for gold inside a tunnel along a mountainside in Sitio Kaumpig in Barangay Temporan, whose entrance was blocked by soil and rocks that fell from its canopy, loosened by heavy rains.

The six miners were identified as siblings Jeneto and Jeyrold Flores, Frigel and Romnel, both surnamed Senados, Marion Catubay and his wife, Aileen.

Police investigators found out that the victims did not have any valid permit for their mining activities, which they kept secret from their local government unit.

The chairperson of Barangay Temporan, Yolly Bernabero, said they learned of the victims’ plight from their companion, Jefrey Flores, who managed to dig his way out of the tunnel.

Flores later died in a hospital while undergoing medication for his injuries.

Bernabero said rescuers had to dig through the tunnel first using farm tools to reach the location of the trapped miners.

The local government unit of Magpet has ordered the immediate closure of illegal mining sites in Barangay Temporan to prevent a repeat of the incident.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/10440265/Rescuers-race-to-reach-cut-off-communities-with-tens-of-thousands-still-missing-from-Typhoon-Haiyan.html

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10,000 dead in Tacloban

As many as 10,000 people are believed dead in this city alone when one of the worst storms on record sent giant sea waves washing away homes, schools and airport buildings, officials said yesterday.

Hundreds of bodies have been recovered while thousands remained missing in the wake of the enormous devastation left by super typhoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) in the Visayas, authorities said.

President Benigno S. Aquino III, who landed in Tacloban yesterday to get a firsthand look at the disaster, said the casualties “will be substantially more” than the official count of 151 — but gave no figure or estimate. He said the government’s priority was to restore power and communications in isolated areas to allow for the delivery of relief and medical assistance to victims.

Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said Aquino was “speechless” when he told him of the devastation the typhoon had wrought in Tacloban.

“I told him all systems are down,” Gazmin said. “There is no power, no water, nothing. People are desperate. They’re looting.”

Ferocious winds ravaged several central islands, burying people under tons of debris and leaving corpses hanging from trees.

The typhoon hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippine archipelago Friday and barreled through six eastern and central islands before exiting into the West Philippine Sea, packing ferocious winds of 235 kph and gusts of 275 kph.

On Leyte Island, regional police chief Elmer Soria said he was told by Gov. Dominic Petilla that there were about 10,000 deaths in the province, mostly by drowning and from collapsed buildings. The figure was based on reports from village officials.

Tacloban City Administrator Tecson Lim said the death toll in the city alone “could go up to 10,000.”

Leyte’s capital is the biggest city in the province with a population of 200,000 people.

About 300-400 bodies have already been recovered but there are “still a lot under the debris,” Lim said. A mass burial was planned Sunday in Palo town near Tacloban.

Many corpses hung on tree branches, buildings and sidewalks.

It’s Horrific — Roxas

Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said a massive rescue operation was underway. “We expect a very high number of fatalities as well as injured,” Roxas said after visiting Tacloban on Saturday. “All systems, all vestiges of modern living — communications, power, water — all are down. Media is down, so there is no way to communicate with the people in a mass sort of way.”

“The devastation is, I don’t have the words for it,” Roxas said. “It’s really horrific. It’s a great human tragedy.”

The Philippines has no resources on its own to deal with a disaster of this magnitude, and the US and other governments and agencies were mounting a major relief effort, said Philippine Red Cross chairman Richard Gordon.

US, Europe Assistance

At the request of the Philippine government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed US Pacific Command to deploy ships and aircraft to support search-and-rescue operations and airlift emergency supplies, according to a statement released by the Defense Department press office.

The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said in a message to Aquino that the EC had sent a team to assist the Philippine authorities and that “we stand ready to contribute with urgent relief and assistance if so required in this hour of need.”

Even by the standards of the Philippines, which is buffeted by many natural calamities — about 20 typhoons a year, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions — the latest disaster shocked the nation of 96 million people.

Deadliest Natural Catastrophe

If the typhoon death toll is confirmed, it would be the deadliest natural catastrophe on record in the Philippines. The deadliest typhoon before “Yolanda” was Tropical Storm “Uring” (international name: Thelma) in November 1991, which killed around 5,100 people in the central Philippines. The deadliest disaster so far was the 1976 magnitude-7.9 earthquake that triggered a tsunami in the Moro Gulf in the southern Philippines, killing 5,791 people.

The airport in Tacloban, about 580 km southeast of Manila, looked like a muddy wasteland of debris, with crumpled tin roofs and upturned cars. The airport tower’s glass windows were shattered, and air force helicopters were busy flying in and out at the start of relief operations. Residential homes that had lined up a 7-kilometer stretch of road leading to Tacloban City were all blown or washed away.

The winds were so strong that Tacloban residents who sought shelter at a local school tied down the roof of the building but it was still ripped off and the school collapsed, Lim said. It wasn’t clear how many died there.

The city’s two largest malls and groceries were looted and the gasoline stations destroyed by the typhoon. Police were deployed to guard a fuel depot to prevent looting of fuel.

“On the way to the airport we saw many bodies along the street,” said Philippine-born Australian Mila Ward, 53, who was waiting at the Tacloban airport to catch a military flight back to Manila.

“They were covered with just anything — tarpaulin, roofing sheets, cardboards,” she said. Asked how many, she said, “Well over 100 where we passed.”

One Tacloban resident said he and others took refuge inside a parked Jeep to protect themselves from the storm, but the vehicle was swept away by a surging wall of water.

“The water was as high as a coconut tree,” said 44-year-old Sandy Torotoro, a bicycle taxi driver who lives near the airport with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. “I got out of the Jeep and I was swept away by the rampaging water with logs, trees and our house, which was ripped off from its mooring.”

“When we were being swept by the water, many people were floating and raising their hands and yelling for help. But what can we do? We also needed to be helped,” Torotoro said.

In Torotoro’s village, bodies could be seen lying along the muddy main road, as residents who had lost their homes huddled, holding on to the few things they had managed to save. The road was lined with trees that had fallen to the ground.

Vice Mayor Jim Pe of Coron town on Busuanga, the last island battered by the typhoon before it blew away to the South China Sea, said most of the houses and buildings there had been destroyed or damaged. Five people drowned in the storm surge and three others were missing, he said by phone.

“It was like a 747 flying just above my roof,” he said, describing the sound of the winds. He said his family and some of his neighbors whose houses were destroyed took shelter in his basement.

Aquino Loses Temper

In Tacloban City, President Aquino reportedly blew his top and momentarily walked out of a briefing with disaster relief officials amid growing frustration with the government response to mitigate the tragedy.

National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council chief Eduardo del Rosario reportedly told the President that 95 percent of Tacloban City was devastated by the storm but Aquino questioned the basis of such assessment.

Aquino was reportedly irritated when Del Rosario supposedly claimed the Tacloban jail with damaged roof was just considered a “minor devastation.” The President pushed for a better government system to verify data on death and destruction left by the storm.

Radio reports also disclosed that the Chief Executive was annoyed by a proposal made by a local businessman to declare martial law or a state of emergency to restore peace and order in Tacloban.

Fatalities Elsewhere

While all attention is on the devastation in Tacloban City and the rest of Leyte, the fatalities in other parts of Visayas are also beginning to pile up as authorities begin reaching the other worst-hit areas.

In Samar, a total of 300 people were confirmed dead in the town of Basey alone. Engr. Leo Dacaynos, of the Provincial Risk Reduction and Management Council of Samar, said Basey and nearby towns are among the hardest hit in the province, adding that most of the fatalities are residents of coastal areas who drowned.

“The seawater rose to up to 20 meters because of storm surge, most of the fatalities drowned,” said Dacaynos in an interview over radio station dzBB.

In Central Visayas, a total of 40 people were reported dead in Cebu alone while three others are missing, two in Cebu and one in Bohol.

In Western Visayas, at least 67 people were reported to have died in four provinces of the region while move than 32 others are in the missing list.

In Iloilo, at least 46 people were killed according to Gov. Arthur Defensor, describing the situation in his province as “very bad.”

Capiz followed next with 17 dead. Aklan, on the other hand, has one dead while Antique has five.

In Coron, Palawan, six fatalities have been accounted, but Mayor Clara Reyes said she the number may still increase as several villages have not been reached disaster response teams.

Reyes described the wrath of the storm that hit Coron as “kasing lakas sa Tacloban.”

She said they badly need the assistance from the national government, noting that of the 24 villages in Coron, there are nine that remain isolated.

Pope’s Call For Prayers

Pope Francis on Saturday has called for prayers for the victims of Typhoon “Yolanda” especially in the Philippines. “I ask all of you to join me in prayer for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda especially those in the beloved islands of the Philippines,” said the Pontiff in his Twitter account @Pontifex.

Caritas Manila Appeal

Caritas Manila is appealing for donations to help the victims of “Yolanda” in the Visayas. “Let us share what we can to help Yolanda relief give to Caritas Manila Damayan,” Fr. Anton Pascual, executive director of Caritas Manila, said.

Donations in cash may be deposited at Caritas Manila Inc. Peso Bank Accounts BPI #3063-5357-01, BDO #5600-45905, Unionbank #00-030-001227-5, PNB 10-856-660001-7, Metrobnk 175-3-17506954-3.

Caritas Manila said in cash donations are used to buy contents for the family emergency relief pack, materials and medicines for first aid kits.

The social action arm of the Archdiocese of Manila also appealed for in-kind donations such as canned goods, potable water, rice, medicines, clothes, undergarments, beddings, linens, personal care and hygiene products, cleaning materials among others.

Donations may be brought to Caritas Manila office at 2002 Jesus St. Pandacan, Manila; Radyo Veritas in West Avenue-Edsa Quezon City or the nearest parish.

Evacuation Centers

Cruz said there are some 114,312 families either staying inside the evacuation centers or with their relatives in the entire region.

Iloilo has the most number of affected with 76,225 families followed by Negros Occidental with almost 13,000 and closely followed by Capiz with 11,656 families.

Some 2,990 families are inside evacuation centers in Aklan while while 1,286 in Antique.

No Power, Water

The entire provinces of Aklan, Antique and Capiz remain without power with the Capiz and Antique also suffering interrupted water supply.

In Negros Occidental, 85 percent of the power supply has already been restored while the power supply from the ILECO 1 has been fully restored.

The power supply in the areas being serviced by ILECO 2 and 3 were restored by 70 to 75 percent.

Canada Assistance

Canada announced that it will provide up to P205.9-million (Cad$5 million) in support to humanitarian organizations striving to meet the needs of the people affected by typhoon Yolanda.

According to the Canadian Embassy in Manila, emergency relief activities will include the provision of emergency shelter, food, water, livelihood support, and other essential services.

“Canada is deeply concerned by the impact of this catastrophic typhoon,” said Canadian Minister of International Development and Minister for La Francophonie Christian Paradis said in a statement. “

British Condolences

Simultaneously, British Minister of State for the Foreign Office Hugo Swire offered his condolences to the Philippines following the devastation caused by the strongest typhoon ever to hit the country this year.

A Department for International Development (DFID) team has already arrived in the Philippines to assess, in consultation with the UN and the Philippine government, what assistance the UK can offer as a matter of urgency.

*In addition to the £4 million (P276 million pesos) for the earlier emergency responses, the British government on Sunday announced a further package of up to £6 million (P414 million) for the humanitarian response to Typhoon Yolanda. *

State of Calamity Call

Lawmakers crossed party lines in calling on President Aquino to declare the country under a state of calamity after super typhoon “Yolanda” wrought havoc in Central Philippines.

The House independent bloc, led by Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez and administrations solons are expected to file today a resolution putting the Philippines under a state of calamity to ensure that the much needed assistance will be extended to the typhoon-stricken provinces, particularly in Tacloban City.

“The needed assistance should be extended immediately to the areas affected by the monster typhoon especially in the hardest hit places. Let us pray for the Filipinos,” said Romualdez, whose province was battered by “Yolanda.”

2-M Families Affected

The number of families affected by super typhoon “Yolanda” has reached two million or 9.53 million individuals in eight regions by mid-Sunday, based on the latest count by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

The number of displaced families went up to 96,039 families or 449,416 individuals staying in evacuation centers, while 36,627 families or 182,378 persons temporarily sought shelter in their relatives’ houses in Regions 4A, 4B, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 13.

DSWD has initially extended P10.6 million worth of relief assistance to Bicol Region, Western Visayas, Central Visayas, Northern Mindanao, and Caraga Region.

AFP Appeal

The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) appealed to those affected by super typhoon “Yolanda” to cooperate with authorities particularly the Philippine National Police (PNP) and Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) as the government works to restore order amidst ongoing rescue, relief and rehabilitation operations.

On its part, the AFP deployed additional 100 soldiers to help police and existing military forces in their efforts to restore peace and order in the typhoon-struck Tacloban City following the devastation left by the storm.

“As we firmly establish command and control in affected areas, we appeal to the public to be patient. We understand your emotion and frustration due to the lack of information coming out,” said Lt. Col. Ramon P. Zagala, the AFP public affairs office (PAO) chief.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.mb.com.ph/10000-dead-in-tacloban/

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From Bosnia to Syria: the investigators identifying victims of genocide

The dead body of the man in the blue T-shirt is covered in blood, and has been dumped in a line with tens of others in the courtyard of a building in Syria. In the colour photograph, the sun is shining down on the corpses, all of whom bear the marks of violence, some showing multiple bullet wounds.

Dr Radwan Ziadeh, the director of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies, clicks on to the next slide in his presentation. It shows a trench filled with the dead bodies of those killed in a massacre in Syria in 2012, the corpses lying jumbled, packed tightly on top of one another.

"That man in the blue T-shirt," says Ziadeh, looking at his audience, "is my cousin." He pauses, looking at the assembled Kurds, Iraqis, Libyans, Bosnians, Serbs, Mexicans, Americans and others in front of him, gathered in the airy auditorium of the Peace Palace in The Hague.

"I never thought," says Ziadeh, a soft-spoken man with a neat moustache and black hair, "that I would see mass graves in my country."

Many in the audience nod firmly in agreement, for, like the activist, who has been documenting human rights abuses in Syria since 2011, they have mass graves in their countries too. They have gathered here in the Netherlands to try to establish a workable method of co-ordinating the multiple, highly complex facets of dealing with the rarified and painful world that is missing persons.

"Before I finish, I want to raise the issue of 'never again'," continues Ziadeh, clicking off his PowerPoint, and handing over the podium to the next speaker. This is a quietly determined American woman who knows all too well that those words, uttered at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg more than 60 years ago, have proved somewhat hollow. With an estimated 48,000 people, mostly civilians, missing in Syria alone – victims of forced disappearances, massacres and executions – the map of world conflict nowadays would instead seem to shout "again and again".

The organisation that Kathryne Bomberger heads – the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) – has perhaps done more than any to account for many of the thousands of people missing worldwide from wars, ethnic cleansing and natural disasters. The officials gathered in front of her from multiple conflict areas bear testament to this.

Croatian president Ivo Josipovic, whose country has uncovered about 150 mass graves from the war in the 1990s, said in the auditorium: "The issue of missing persons remains at the heart of every armed conflict."

"Syria," says Bomberger, "is a looming challenge. The challenge to carry out the non-discriminatory search for the missing is the challenge of the former Yugoslavia, is the challenge of Syria, the challenge of Libya, and the challenge of Iraq."

She should know. When, in 1999, the ICMP set out to find and identify the estimated 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who had gone missing following the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia, many people said it could never be done. After all, the bodies of the men killed by the Bosnian Serb forces of General Ratko Mladic – now on trial for genocide in a Hague courtroom, a mile from the ICMP conference – had been buried in dozens of mass graves hidden in the wild Bosnian countryside. One forensic scientist said that finding the victims and giving them back their identities would be akin to "solving the world's greatest forensic puzzle".

Undaunted, Bomberger and the ICMP picked up the gauntlet, and 18 years later, using advanced DNA-identification techniques at their Sarajevo laboratory, have identified nearly 7,000 of the Srebrenica dead, along with another 10,000 people missing from the Balkans conflicts of the 90s. The small organisation, only about 175 strong, is made up of forensic scientists, geneticists, biologists, human rights experts and support staff. A high percentage are from the former Yugoslavia, tenacious and resourceful people recruited in Bosnia after the war.

ICMP has now spread its operational wings: it is helping to identify the missing of Iraq and Libya, and has identified Chilean victims of General Pinochet from the 1970s, hundreds of cases from natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Asian tsunami in December 2004, and even soldiers from the second world war.

When former British foreign secretary David Miliband, visiting their Bosnian headquarters in 2009, branded them a "global centre of excellence", he was not being overgenerous. Danish professor Niels Morling, vice-president of the International Society for Forensic Genetics, gets straight to the point: "The work of the ICMP is almost incredible – its work with DNA is, without doubt, the single most important achievement within the field of human identification with DNA."

So is it time to use this expertise to help Syria? And how? For now it is too early to say, as setting up a workable programme to handle missing persons – which means, to start with, finding and exhuming the dead – is obviously impossible while civil war is cracking across the country. And ICMP, as it says in its mandate, "provides assistance to governments", so some sort of post-conflict administration would have to be in place in Syria to request help in dealing with the thorny issue of missing persons.

But suffice to say that ICMP has already received a delegation of interested parties at its Sarajevo headquarters, which included Ziadeh.

So how on Earth, if asked, would it go looking for 48,000 missing people in a place such as Syria? What forensic science and human rights tools would it need, what judicial and legal permissions? How, in short, would it all work? And why is it so important to deal with the problem of missing people?

How it might operate forensically in Syria is reflected by how it is working this week, several hundred miles south of The Hague, in the chilly autumn of north-western Bosnia. In an enormous clay pit set in scrubby woodland outside the hamlet of Tomasica, British, American and Bosnian forensic experts from the ICMP, along with counterparts from Bosnia's Missing Persons Institute, are digging up hundreds of muddy, grey-brown corpses. These are Bosnians executed 20 years ago, painstakingly exhumed from one of the largest mass graves ever found in the country. So far, 247 complete bodies have been recovered.

It is a mammoth feat of engineering and forensics, to start with: the corpses, alleged to be victims of ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serb forces in and around the nearby town of Prijedor in 1993, are buried about 7.5 metres (25 feet) under the surface. In an area larger than a football pitch, 40,000 cubic metres of gluey, hard-packed clay has had to be removed with diggers in order to access the bodies. They lie underneath it in jumbled panoplies of death, teeth exposed, mouths open, skin still attached in greying shrouds to their skeletons, for ever frozen in their moment of mortal truth.

The decomposition of human bodies is slowed by a lack of oxidisation, and the clay in the grave has effectively sealed the bodies from the outside air. The process of saponification, whereby after death the body's tissue turns to a soap-like substance called adipocere, also called grave-wax, has been slowed. Muscular and organ tissue still clings to the skeletons.

Once exhumed, the bodies are taken to a nearby makeshift mortuary, to begin the road through ICMP's DNA laboratory system. Hopefully, for the living relatives of the Tomasica dead, who have waited 20 agonising years to find them, this will see the remains identified and returned to their families for proper burial. The legal, forensic and human rights apparatus that makes this possible – the pathologists, mortuaries, autopsies, associations of living family members, DNA labs, data-matching software, court orders – is a vast operational monolith whose running the ICMP has perfected in Bosnia since the war. Wherever it goes, it must operate within the framework of any given country's laws.



"Science cannot exist in a vacuum," says an ICMP director. "It has to coincide with a rule-of-law approach."

In The Hague, Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans called for the ICMP to be given legal status under international law to enable it to operate worldwide – a motion supported by the UK, whose successive governments have been among the 22 worldwide that have funded the organisation over the past 17 years.



Regardless of whether the victims in question are from Kosovo or Iraq or Libya – or, as at Tomasica, from Bosnia – the identification of missing people is desperately important for human rights, reconciliation and justice. It establishes accurate numbers of casualties, and they prove what happened. On history's card table, they lay down a scientifically precise ace of spades. They put in place an absolutist cornerstone of the process of rule-of-law, as establishing numbers of missing persons is also vital for any war crimes trials.

It helps with natural disasters and terrorist incidents too – ICMP staff are currently in Nairobi, assisting with the aftermath of the Westgate shopping mall attack. Last summer, when a train caught fire off Lac-Mégantic in Canada, killing 50 people, the heavily burned remains of some of the victims arrived in the Sarajevo DNA laboratory.

ICMP's work is also, with the consent of relatives of the victims, used as evidence in war crimes trials, such as those of senior Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic, being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), also based in The Hague. This provision of evidence can thus contribute to a newly emerging form of "atrocity accountability". It issues a warning to warlords the world over that their crimes can, one day, come back to haunt them in international courts.

But first the remains of missing persons have to be identified. Since the 1970s, thousands of people have gone missing from conflicts in countries including Chile, El Salvador and Iraq, as well as the Balkans. Before the ICMP started using DNA testing in 2000, human remains were mostly identified through artefacts found with them: dentures, blood-stained clothing, documents and fingerprints – the stark, mundane memorabilia of violent human demise. The problem was that this method was unreliable.

Two years after the 1995 Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war, President Bill Clinton introduced an initiative to found the ICMP. In the dry, formal language of mandate and policy, its job was to provide a proper accounting of the persons missing from the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia. It then proceeded to revolutionise the process of making large numbers of DNA matches on missing persons' remains. Using blood samples taken from the living relatives of victims, it matched them with the DNA taken from skeletal remains exhumed from mass graves, such as those from Srebrenica. Bomberger says: "In the early days, while mankind had been able to map the human genome, the ICMP was using DNA technology to map a human genocide."

So how does this identification process work, and what makes the ICMP's laboratory system unique? The answer lies partly in the vast numbers of human remains it handles – 40,000 people were missing in the former Yugoslavia alone – which no other commercial or government laboratory could even approach.

Second, it has developed its own matching software and vast databases containing genetic information from nearly 100,000 people, both living and dead. From this, it developed a system that could cross-reference vast numbers of DNA samples, taken from blood given by living relatives, and that extracted from remains exhumed from graves. By November 2008, for instance, ICMP would have collected more than 86,650 blood samples from living Balkans' relatives alone. The more blood samples that were collected, the easier it proved to cross-match DNA samples taken from the bones of exhumed victims.

Third, the ICMP's laboratory system excels at extracting tiny amounts of DNA from heavily "degraded" bone samples. The DNA molecules that are best protected in bone are in the osteocytes – a type of cell – of mineralised cortical portions of hard bone, such as femurs. These are the hardest substances in the human anatomy and the ones that best resist the degradation of time and burial.

It was thus much harder for the ICMP to extract DNA from the human remains of Norwegian soldiers who had been killed on the eastern front north of Leningrad in the second world war than it was to extract DNA from Hurricane Katrina victims from 2005. The Norwegian soldiers had lain where they fell, on the surface of the Arctic tundra, for more than 60 years since 1944, frozen in winter, defrosted in summer, heavily oxidised, with interim interference from animals such as arctic foxes. The Katrina samples were fresh.

ICMP's central DNA laboratory is set in a quiet part of northern Sarajevo. The identification process for DNA profiling, or "fingerprinting", starts with blood and bone samples. Human remains, once they are exhumed from sites such as Tomasica, are washed, autopsied and catalogued. Bone samples, each about 10-15cm (4-6in) long, are cut with electric saws from the long bones, such as the femurs, of the victims.

Electric grinders are then used to scour dirt from the surface of the bone samples, which tend to absorb colouring and stains from the surrounding earth and from the clothing covering the corpse. When the ICMP was exhuming Bosnian mass graves in the years after the war, some of the clothing that sometimes appeared best-preserved was that made by Levi Strauss. A common contaminant that can impede the DNA extraction process is humic acid, a constituent part of many soil types.

Then, ground down into very fine powder, the bone samples are washed, and in a chemical solution, "lysis" takes place. This is the process of breaking down a cell so its constituent parts can be isolated for examination. The resultant liquid sample is then purified to remove any traces of detergents or reagents, spun in centrifuges and treated in devices equipped with silica membranes to which, simply put, the microscopic DNA particles adhere.

The DNA profile of a person is made by the ICMP using the Nuclear Short Tandem Repeat (STR) method. The main building blocks of the DNA molecule are four nitrogen-containing compounds called nucleobases – adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. The DNA double helix is normally made up of two DNA molecules, whose component parts intertwine like the branches of a weaving vine.

These four nucleobases repeat all along the DNA strand, pairing off and building "base pairs" of adenine with thymine, cytosine with guanine. The patterns in which they repeat and occur on the DNA strand are different in each human being, and form the basis of STRs. If the DNA strand can be amplified millions of times, the patterns of these repeats can be identified, and a profile of them obtained. This is the human DNA profile or "fingerprint".

Yet the scientific successes of the ICMP could never have been realised without the residual human sadness of thousands of relatives of missing people. Kada Hotic is one of these. A Bosnian Muslim woman, she lost her husband, son, two brothers and an uncle at Srebrenica in 1995. Over the subsequent 18 years, as the vice-president of the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica, she has followed ICMP's development, and its exhumation of the dozens of Srebrenica mass graves. These have led to her being reunited with the correctly identified remains of her five male relatives. She sums it up simply: "ICMP has done great things: it gave us back the ones we love."

One exceptional part played in the aftermath of the Balkan wars by the ICMP was to introduce measures to ensure justice. This approach, stresses Adam Boys, the organisation's chief operating officer, a former chartered accountant from Argyll, is about the rule of law. "You simply cannot kill tens, hundreds or thousands of people and expect to get away with it," he says. "I strongly believe that this message will be increasingly reinforced so that military leaders or their governments will consider hard before they commit crimes: ICMP's legacy and the legacies of similar institutions that support the rule of law could be a diminution in the number and scale of atrocities."

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/nov/10/bosnia-syria-victims-of-genocide-dna

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Philippines: 'bodies in the streets', with many feared dead in typhoon Haiyan

At least 100 people have died in the Philippines from the impact of super typhoon Haiyan, a senior government official said on Saturday.

Many bodies were lying in the streets of the central city of Tacloban, according to reports received by Captain John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines.

Andrews told the Associated Press the "reliable" information about the deaths was relayed to him by his staff in Tacloban, but communications with the capital Manila were only possible every few hours.

Officials said most of the houses in Tacloban, a city of about 220,000 people, had been destroyed in a surge of flood water and high winds, according to Reuters.

Before communications were cut on Friday, city officials had reported heavy flooding. Mobile phone networks, power lines and trees were toppled and most roads were cut off.

"Almost all houses were destroyed, many are totally damaged. Only a few are left standing, but with partial damage," said Major Rey Balido, a spokesman for the national disaster agency.

Cabinet secretary Rene Almendras, a senior aide to President Benigno Aquino, said that the number of casualties could not be immediately determined, but that the figure was "probably in that range" given by Andrews. Government troops were helping recover bodies, he said.

US marine Colonel Mike Wylie, who surveyed the situation in Tacloban in preparation for possible American assistance, said the damage to the runway at the seaside air terminal was significant, but military planes were still able to land with relief aid.

"The storm surge came in fairly high and there is significant structural damage and trees blown over," he told the AP.

The Philippine television station GMA reported its news team saw 11 bodies, including that of a child, washed ashore on Friday and 20 more bodies at a pier in Tacloban hours after the typhoon ripped through the coastal city.

At least 20 more bodies were taken to a church in nearby Palo town that was used as an evacuation centre but had to be abandoned when its roofs were blown away, the TV network reported. TV images showed howling winds peeling off tin roof sheets during heavy rain.

Ferocious winds felled large branches and snapped coconut trees. A man was shown carrying the body of his six-year-old daughter, who drowned, and another image showed vehicles piled up in debris.

Haiyan, one of the strongest storms ever to hit land, was leaving the Philippines behind on Saturday, having flattened houses, triggered landslides and floods and knocked out power and communications across a number of islands. More than 750,000 people were forced to flee their homes.

The toll of death and damage is expected to rise sharply as rescue workers and soldiers reach areas cut off by the massive, fast-moving storm, now heading towards Vietnam.

Authorities in 15 provinces in Vietnam started to call back boats and prepare for possible landslides. Nearly 300,000 people were moved to safer areas in two provinces alone – Da Nang and Quang Nam – according to the government's website.

Forecasters said the storm was expected to pick up renewed strength over the South China Sea.

There were hopes the Philippines had avoided a worse disaster because the rapidly moving typhoon blew away before wreaking more damage, officials said.

But because communications were severed, it was impossible to know the full extent of casualties and damage.

Southern Leyte governor Roger Mercado said the typhoon ripped roofs off houses and triggered landslides that blocked roads. The dense clouds and heavy rains made the day seem almost as dark as night, he said.

"When you're faced with such a scenario, you can only pray and pray and pray," Mercado told the Associated Press by telephone. He said mayors in the province had not called in to report any major damage.

"I hope that means they were spared and not the other way around," he said. "My worst fear is there will be massive loss of lives and property."

Eduardo del Rosario, head of the disaster response agency, said the speed at which the typhoon sliced through the central islands helped prevent its 375-mile band of rain clouds dumping enough of their load to overflow waterways. Flooding from heavy rains is often the main cause of deaths from typhoons.

"It has helped that the typhoon blew very fast in terms of preventing lots of casualties," regional military commander Lieutenant-general Roy Deveraturda said. He said the evacuation of so many villagers before the storm also saved many lives.

As relief workers began assessing the damage, US secretary of state John Kerry said his country stood ready to help.

"Having so recently had my own visit to the Philippines prevented by another powerful storm, I know that these horrific acts of nature are a burden that you have wrestled with and courageously surmounted before. Your spirit is strong," Kerry said in a statement.

Among the evacuees were thousands of residents of Bohol who had been camped in tents and other makeshift shelters since a magnitude-7.2 earthquake hit the island province last month.

Relief workers said they were struggling to find ways to deliver food and other supplies, with roads blocked by landslides and fallen trees.

Saturday 09 November 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/09/philippines-bodies-streets-hundreds-feared-dead-typhoon-haiyan

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Super typhoon Haiyan slams into Philippines, at least four dead

The strongest typhoon in the world this year and possibly the most powerful ever to hit land smashed into the Philippines on Friday, forcing more than a million people to flee, flooding villages and raising fears of widespread casualties.

At least four people were killed and seven injured, national disaster agency spokesman Rey Balido told reporters in Manila. The death toll could rise as more reports arrive.

"The humanitarian impact of Haiyan threatens to be colossal," said Patrick Fuller, spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Power and communications in the three large islands of Samar, Leyte and Bohol were almost completely down but authorities promised to restore them within 24 hours.

Officials warned that more than 12 million people were at risk, including residents of Cebu City, which has a population of about 2.5 million, and areas still reeling from a deadly 2011 storm and a 7.2-magnitude quake last month.

"The super typhoon likely made landfall with winds near 195 mph (313 kph). This makes Haiyan the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall," said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at U.S.-based Weather Underground.

About a million people took shelter in 29 provinces, after President Benigno Aquino appealed to people in Haiyan's path to leave vulnerable areas, such as river banks, coastal villages and mountain slopes.

"Our school is now packed with evacuees," an elementary school teacher in Southern Leyte, who gave her name only as Feliza, told a radio station. Leyte and Southern Leyte are about 630 km (390 miles) southeast of Manila.

Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla reported a 3-metre (10-ft) flood in one village in Leyte. "There is zero communication at the moment," he told ANC television.

NO POWER, LANDSLIDES

"Roads are still impassable. There are some landslides," said Roger Mercado, governor of Southern Leyte province.

More than 100 coastal homes were flattened, while landslides destroyed houses in the hills, but his province had seen no casualties yet, he told Reuters.

In Samar province, links with some towns and villages had been cut, officials said.

"The whole province has no power," Samar Governor Sharee Tan told Reuters by telephone. Fallen trees, toppled electric poles and other debris blocked roads, she said.

Authorities suspended ferry services and fishing and shut 13 airports. Nearly 450 domestic, and eight international, flights were suspended.

Schools, offices and shops in the central regions were shut, with hospitals, soldiers and emergency workers preparing rescue efforts. Twenty navy ships and military aircraft including three C-130 cargo planes and helicopters were on standby.

"Power is off all across the island and the streets are deserted," said Lionel Dosdosa, an International Organization for Migration coordinator on Bohol island, the epicentre of an October 15 earthquake that killed 222 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. He said power was off and streets were deserted.

At the Sandcastles Beach Resort in Boracay, guests stayed indoors. "The beach is abandoned. The winds are whistling unceasingly, so we secured our homes and the resort," Jenelyn Castro, one of the resort's staff, said by telephone.

The state weather bureau said Haiyan was expected to move past the Philippines on Saturday and out over the South China Sea, where it could strengthen even further and hit Vietnam.

Meteorologists in Vietnam said it could be the country's strongest storm ever. Evacuations had already begun, the state-run Voice of Vietnam radio said.

The world's strongest recorded typhoon, cyclone or hurricane to make landfall was Hurricane Camille in 1969, which hit the southern U.S. state of Mississippi with 305 kph (190 mph) winds, said Weather Underground's Masters.

An average of 20 typhoons hit the Philippines every year.

Last year, Typhoon Bopha flattened three towns on Mindanao, killed 1,100 people and caused damages of more than $1 billion.

Haiyan is the second category 5 typhoon to hit the Philippines this year after Typhoon Usagi in September.

Friday 08 November 2013

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/uk-philippines-typhoon-idUKBRE9A701120131108

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Hyderabad bus fire: DNA sleuths reach dead end on bus four

Forensic specialists have reached a dead end trying to identify four of the 45 passengers who were charred to death in the October 30 Volvo crash near Hyderabad, saying the heat had “so deeply carbonised” the bodies that there was “no DNA in them any more”.

Sources in the Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory said DNA samples taken from relatives have not matched with the remains thought to be those of Sonu Kumar, Vijay Kumar, Ajay Kumar Chouhan and P. Rajesh of Bangalore. The first three were from Uttar Pradesh. Rajesh was from Bangalore.

“We are seeking expert opinion from other national-level institutions like the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology for an alternative method,” a lab official said.

The speeding Hyderabad-bound Volvo, which had left Bangalore the night before, had skidded while overtaking a car and hit a culvert. The impact ignited the fire.

Relatives identified three of the bodies on the spot, some 130km from Hyderabad, while 42 bodies were shifted to the Osmania hospital mortuary for DNA profiling. They are still trying to identify one body.

The lab had trouble matching the DNA of a toddler with that of her mother. Family members of the nearly two-year-old child had requested authorities to hand over her body and that of a woman in whose lap she was found.

But lab officials decided to wait for the test results, which showed that the child’s DNA did not match that of the woman. A match was found after tests were conducted on the other female victims on the bus. Lab officials said mother and infant were separated when tragedy struck, and the woman found clutching the baby died with her while trying to shield her from the flames.

Friday 08 November 2013

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131108/jsp/nation/story_17543535.jsp

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Lagos releases DNA test results as families besiege hospital to receive bodies

It was yet another moment of agony for relatives of the victims of the Associated Airline plane that crashed in Lagos on Thursday, October 3, as the Lagos State Government yesterday released the results of the DNA tests conducted to identify the corpses of those burnt beyond recognition.

The families and relatives of the victims had approached the Taiwo Ogunsola Services morgue located within the premises of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja, yesterday as the management of the hospital’s pathology department and that of the morgue were perfecting plans to release the bodies to the families.

A consultant pathologist at the Department of Pathology and Forensic Medicine, Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and Chairman, Nigeria Medical Association, (NMA), Lagos State Chapter, Dr. Francis Faduyile has confirmed to Daily Times that the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) sample results of the victims of the ill-fated Associated Airways plane that crashed on October 3, 2013 in Lagos has arrived the country.

Speaking with our reporter in a telephone interview, Dr. Faduyile said: “The DNA results have arrived the country and family members, relatives can come for the corpses; they are ready for collection.”

Nigerian Tribune gathered that relatives of the victims had crowded the Lekan Ogunsola Memorial House, the mortuary at LASUTH very early on Thursday morning to get their corpses as promised by the state government, but were, however, delayed before corpses were actually released.

The state government had promised that the result of the DNA test would be after four weeks of collecting DNA samples from relatives of the plane crash victims.

The Chief Examiner and Vice Chancellor of the Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM), Professor John Obafunwa, had assured that some of the identifiable bodies would be released to their families once the necessary identification and documentation processes had been completed.

He explained that the overseas DNA examination and delay that was witnessed in the process were to ensure proper identification of corpses and receipt by the right relatives.

The Embraer 120 aircraft with registration number SCD 361 belonging to Associated Aviation Limited was conveying the remains of the late Ondo State Governor, Dr Olusegun Agagu, to Ondo State for burial when it crashed a few minutes after take off from the local wing of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport.

Friday 08 November 2013

http://leadership.ng/news/081113/agagu-lagos-releases-dna-test-families-besiege-hospital-receive-bodies

http://www.spyghana.com/bodies-of-lagos-plane-crash-to-be-released-to-families/

http://tribune.com.ng/news2013/index.php/en/news/item/25803-associated-plane-crash-victims%E2%80%99-relatives-lament-delay-in-release-of-corpses.html

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100th Anniversary: Many lost at sea during 'The White Hurricane of 1913'

It happened 100 years before the news media ever thought of coining the term "superstorm" to describe a weather event. But, this truly was a superstorm. It's known as the White Hurricane, or the Freshwater Fury and it was destined to go down in history as the worst winter storm to ever affect the Great Lakes and northern Ohio.

From Nov. 7-11, 1913, heavy snow, hurricane force winds, and waves over 35-feet high pounded the Great Lakes and its nearby shores. A total of 250 people died in the storm. The vast majority were crew members on board the 12 ships that sank on four of the five Great Lakes.

By Nov. 8, 1913, the storm had not yet reached its full intensity. The cold front had crossed Lake Superior and Lake Michigan and was knocking on Ohio's door. Still, northern Ohio was experiencing mild temperatures ahead of the front along with wind and some rain. Highs for this day in 1913 reached into the upper 50s here. The other low pressure system was still in the southern Appalachians and had yet to merge with the Great Lakes Alberta Clipper. But the bottom was about to fall out of this tranquil weather pattern.

Across Michigan and Minnesota and the nearby lakes, the storm was now being labeled "severe." According to weather bureau reports, northwesterly winds had reached gale strength on northern Lake Michigan and western Lake Superior, with winds of up to 60 miles per hour near Duluth, Minn.

There were no satellites or radars in use back then. Few knew what was coming. Weather reports were spotty and had to be relayed by radio. Still, Gale Warning flags went up in over 100 ports along the Great Lakes warning ships of the wind danger. But many captains ignored these primitive warnings.

Why? The storm played a little trick.

Winds temporarily died down. This is known as a "Sucker Hole." Many ships' captains noticed the lull and decided to head out to sea again. Ship traffic increased from Lake Erie up past Detroit into Lake Huron. Unfortunately for many, this would be their last journey. Many of the lost ships had northern Ohio ties. The Argus, John A. McGean, Charles S. Price, Hydrus, Henry B. Smith and Isaac M. Scott were all built in Lorain by the American Shipbuilding company.

PART I: Great Lakes Hurricane of 1913 deadliest winter storm in northern Ohio history

At the storm's peak, on Nov. 9, winds were clocked on Lakes Huron, Michigan, Erie and Superior between 60 and 90 mph. Lake Erie experienced near-hurricane force winds for a whopping 16-straight hours. Even the larger ore carriers were no match for the wind and the waves. Especially those vessels that ended up in southern Lake Huron during the storm's peak. Here, waves reached about 35-feet tall. Eight ships sank on Lake Huron during the storm. One ship went down in Lake Erie and in Lake Michigan. Two boats sank in Lake Superior. What's more, 30 other ships were tossed aground in the storm.

According to the National Weather Service, The Henry B. Smith was a steel freighter built in 1906 by the American Ship Building Company of Lorain, Ohio. The ship was 525-feet in length and 6,631 tons. The Smith arrived at Marquette on Nov. 6 to take on iron ore but cold weather caused the ore to freeze inside the hopper cars, which resulted in a loading delay. On Nov. 9, the Smith backed away from the dock and witnesses on shore watched the deckhands frantically trying to close the Smith’s hatches. After about 20 minutes, the full force of the gale hit the Smith as huge waves crashed over its deck. Instead of turning to starboard on the usual course for Sault Ste. Marie, the Smith headed north into Lake Superior and into oblivion. Captain James L. Owen and 25 of his crew never returned home. The shipwreck was finally located in May 2013 in 535 feet of water off Marquette, Michigan.

The tales of sailors lost come from those watching from the shore the following week. In the book by Robert J. Hemming titled, "Ships Gone Missing," the author graphically describes what many saw in the thick fog the day after the storm passed:

"Singly and by twos and threes they drifted in, as if coming to be present at some ghastly muster, shrouded in life jackets bearing the names of ships gone missing. The Argus, McGean, Hydrus, Scott, and Price had all sent representatives to shore to announce to everyone that they foundered, that their crews were all dead. Stiff, bloated and battered, their heads capped in ice, they floated in, rolled and pitched by the combers crashing on the beach.

They came draped over life preservers, they came wrapped in each others arms, they came frozen together in clusters. All week long they came, to be collected by area farmers who sometimes had to dig half-buried bodies out of the sand that was trying to cover them."

Local police were called in to prevent local residents from looting the bodies. In all, only 56 of the more than 200 victims' bodies were recovered from the lakes after the storm.

Other tales of lost sailors are chronicled by William Deedler, a weather historian and meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Pontiac, Michigan, who shares this fascinating story of mistaken identity:

"Another tale surrounded a unidentified sailor with the initials J.T. on his arm. After reading about it in the paper, Mrs Edward Ward, telegrammed her father, Thomas Thompson of Hamilton, Ontario, telling him his son (her brother) John, must be the unidentified man. John Thompson had been on the (missing ship) The Carruthers, like the unidentified man and also had a tattoo with the initials J.T. on his arm. Therefore, Thomas rushed to the funeral home to identify the body. The body was badly battered but the facial features, similar to John's, were still largely recognizable. Other similarities were compelling, the feet had crossed toes, just like John's, the tattoo was on the left arm, like John's and a scar on the nose and leg matched John's perfectly. Not to mention, the body's teeth had the same teeth missing as John's! There was, however, a puzzling fact that didn't match...the hair color. The corpse's hair was light brown, while John's was almost black! The undertaker dismissed this fact, figuring the body, being immersed in cold water for a long time could have caused the hair to be lighter. In light of all the remarkable similarities, they went ahead with the funeral. You guessed it, it wasn't John. Right in the middle of John's memorial service, in walks John! You could have knocked over the mourners with a feather as they stood there, stunned as the resemblance was uncanny! Evidently, John had jumped ship to be on a ship called the Maple and waited out the storm in Toronto, where he read about his "death." Thinking it would be a real good joke, he said nothing to his family and friends and thus, walked in on his own funeral!"

The unidentified sailor, thought to be John Thompson, was never identified. He was buried with four other anonymous victims.

Other ships lost:

The HYDRUS: the 436-foot long, 4,737-ton steel bulk freighter R.E. Schuck was built by the the American Shipbuilding Company in Lorain, Ohio in 1903. Schuck was later renamed Hydrus. On November 9, 1913 while carrying a load of iron ore through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie immediately behind the James Carruthers, Hydrus encountered the start of the great storm. Heading southbound towards the St. Clair River and not far into Lake Huron, the ship foundered and sank with Captain John H. Lowe and a crew of 27 on board. The ship has not yet been found.

The JOHN A McGEAN: This ship sailed out of Lake Erie with a load of coal bound for Lake Superior. At 2:10 Sunday morning the ship cleared Port Huron and headed into Lake Huron with fresh northwest winds on its bow. A few minutes behind the McGean was the steamer Isaac M. Scott, also headed north. The two vessels hugged the western lakeshore to take advantage of the protective effect of the landmass, but after reaching the Thumb were forced to head straight north into Lake Huron. The steel freighter was only five years old, having been built by the A.M. Shipbuilders Company of Lorain, Ohio, in 1908. It was 432 feet in length and 5,100 tons. Ten miles off Port Hope, the McGean suddenly went to pieces and quickly sank with Captain Chauncey R. Ney and 23 of his crew. The shipwreck was discovered in 1985 in 175 feet of water, upside down on the lake bottom like the Isaac M. Scott and several other storm victims.

CHARLES S. PRICE: The 504-foot, 6,322-ton steel bulk freighter Charles S. Price was built in 1910 by the American Shipbuilding Company of Lorain, Ohio. It was hauling coal northbound into Lake Huron when it disappeared somewhere off the Thumb with Captain William A. Black and 27 of his crew. The day following the storm a huge steel freighter was discovered floating belly up, completely coated with ice and without any identifying marks in view. Originally, people assumed the vessel was the Regina, and when Price bodies washed ashore, including one wearing a Regina lifebelt, word spread of a possible collision between the two ships. A hard hat diver inspecting the hulk on November 15th, however, identified it as the Charles S. Price. The shipwreck is located 11 miles southeast of Lexington in 72 feet of water and is still inverted on the lake floor.

THE ISAAC M. SCOTT: The 504-foot steel bulk freighter Isaac M. Scott, named after the president of the La Belle Iron Works, was built in 1909 by American Shipbuilding of Lorain, Ohio for the Virginia Steam Ship Company of Cleveland. Commanded by Capt. A. McArthur, the Scott was up bound from Cleveland to Milwaukee carrying coal valued at $22,000. The ship was last seen during the morning of Nov. 9 off Tawas, Michigan south of Thunder Bay just a few hours before the brunt of the storm. The Scott disappeared with 28 lives. One of its lifeboats was found 23 miles north of the Chantrey Island lighthouse, off Southampton, Ontario but no other trace of the vessel was located. The giant steel shipwreck today sits intact though inverted on the lake bottom northeast of Thunder Bay Island.

THE LIGHT VESSEL 82: This ship was the only one to sink on Lake Erie. The 95 foot long steel lightship was built in Muskegon, MI, and delivered to Buffalo for lighthouse service during the summer of 1912 at a cost of nearly $50,000. LV 82 was to temporarily mark the approaches to Buffalo Harbor, which was one of the busiest ports in the world during this era. While most of the shipping in Buffalo heeded the storm warning issued by the fledgling Weather Bureau, LV 82 was anchored well offshore between Buffalo Harbor and Point Abino when it went missing during the height of the storm, on Monday, Nov 10. Captain Hugh Williams and his crew of five were lost with the ship. The following May, after the ice had broke up and flowed down the Niagara River, LV 82 was found. The search ship Surveyor came across the wreckage in 62 feet of water, two miles off station. The ship was raised and salvaged with the hull being re-floated and towed to Detroit where the ship was re-built and fitted as a relief lightship. Lightships outside Buffalo harbor were later replaced by the building of Canada’s Point Abino Lighthouse in 1918.

Friday 08 November 2013

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/weather/weather_news/100th-Anniversary-Many-lost-at-sea-during-The-White-Hurricane-of-1913

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Kenya: No more unidentified bodies accepted at Teso morgue

The Frapa Funeral Home Kocholya in Teso North has stopped accepting unidentified bodies delivered by police. Manager Judith Aluku said police have been directed to take such bodies to public mortuaries in Bungoma, Busia or Webuye districts.

“Such failures may compromise the facility’s hygiene, which has been operating efficiently since February 23. She was speaking to the Star at the funeral home yesterday.

Aluku said the move is meant to decongest the mortuary. “We only accept identified bodies brought in by relatives who collect them at the touch of a button,” she said.

Aluku said the home does not have an ambulance. Teso police boss Gladys Rutere said Frapa has the right to decide its operation policies.

Friday 08 November 2013

http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-142856/no-more-unidentified-bodies-teso-morgue

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Mahabubnagar bus fire: 3 more bodies identified

Three more bodies of victims of the Volvo bus tragedy at Mahabubnagar were identified on Thursday, bringing the total number to 44.

The three were identified as Anita and Manjunath Reddy of Bangalore and Gaurav Vikrant Ray of Patna. The body of one Maithili is yet to be identified and officials hope to complete the procedure by Friday.

Forty five people lost their lives in the accident on October 30.

The authorities handed over 41 bodies to their family members while bodies of three victims - Ajay Chauhan, Sonu Kumar and Vijay Kumar of Uttar Pradesh - are kept at mortuary as the family members intend to take them on Friday, officials said.

Friday 08 November 2013

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/bus-tragedy-3-bodies-identified/article5326727.ece

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Naivasha hospital: Mortuary to bury unclaimed bodies in 21 days

Public health department in Naivasha has issued a 21-day notice to bury 35 unclaimed bodies lying at the Naivasha district hospital mortuary.

The department called on members of the public whose kin had been missing to check with the hospital before the bodies are disposed.

Issuing the notice, Naivasha district public health officer Mr Samuel King’ori noted that some of bodies were badly decomposed.

King’ori said that the bodies had exceeded the required 21 days in the mortuary and hence the move to dispose them.

“The hospital hereby issues a twenty one day notice for the bodies to be claimed failure to which they will be buried in a mass grave at the municipal cemetery,” reads the notice in part.

Among the bodies set for disposal are 12 minors below four years who had died in the hospital.

King’ori expressed his concern over the high number of relatives abandoning their kin in the hospital once they died.

“Majority of the minors died in the hospital wards and their relatives decided to abandon them and hence the crisis,” he noted.

The superintendent in charge of the hospital Dr Joseph Mburu confirmed the crisis in the mortuary.

He said that services in the facility whose capacity is twelve bodies were overstretched and hence the move to dispose the bodies.

Mburu however noted that one of the bodies had been identified, collected and buried by relatives.

“The hospital currently has over fifty bodies against a capacity of twelve and this is affecting our services,” he said.

The doctor noted with concern over certain communities that were abandoning their babies in the hospital wards whenever they passed on.

“We have come to realize that some communities do not bury their minors and have been abandoning them in the hospital,” he noted.

He said the bodies are taking their toll on the hospital's budget as the number increases by the day. Mburu said the mortuary capacity is 12 but they currently have about 50 bodies.

“We have issued a notice through the courts to bury the 26 unclaimed bodies, which have been in the mortuary for more than three months,” he said.

hospital superintendent Dr Joseph Mburu said majority of the unclaimed bodies were brought in by police who had collected them from accident scenes and other areas.

He said the hospital has the highest number of unclaimed bodies in Kenya. The doctor said there is an urgent need to open a council mortuary in the town to deal with the high number of unclaimed bodies.

He said that a council mortuary constructed by an investor in the 1990s needs to be refurbished as it had been vandalised.

He said the hospital has the highest number of unclaimed bodies in Kenya. The doctor said there is an urgent need to open a council mortuary in the town to deal with the high number of unclaimed bodies.

He said that a council mortuary constructed by an investor in the 1990s needs to be refurbished as it had been vandalised.

Thursday 07 November 2013

http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-142709/naivasha-hospital-bury-unclaimed-dead

http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000065434&story_title=Kenya:%20Mortuary%20to%20bury%20unclaimed%20bodies%20in%2021%20days

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Man who lived his life dedicated to ensuring a dignified burial for unclaimed bodies in Chennai dies in hospital

M.S. Sivakumar, who helped trace families of abandoned patients and helped orphans in hospital, died at Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (GH) on Wednesday.

It can only be tragic irony that a man who lived his life dedicated to ensuring a dignified burial for unclaimed bodies, died all alone in a ward at a government hospital.

On Tuesday, the 56-year-old was found lying unconscious beside his two-wheeler on EVR Periyar Salai opposite Central Station near Buhari Hotel. He had sustained a head injury.

Some passers-by and police who recognised him, admitted him to GH. An MRI and CT scan revealed a severe head injury. On Tuesday night, he underwent surgery.

However, around 12.30 p.m. on Wednesday, doctors declared him dead.

When the Thane cyclone struck in 2012 and six sailors went missing, Mr. Sivakumar was one of the few people who rushed to help the families in distress.

Mr. Sivakumar drove from one hospital to the other, offering his services. The helpful social worker, clad in white, would frequent government hospital mortuaries, police stations and the courts. He regularly petitioned the Madras High Court for dignified burials of unclaimed bodies.

Mr. Sivakumar had been honoured by GH several years ago for his services, at a function organised by the surgical gastroenterology department.

The hospital’s resident medical officer (RMO) Anand Pratap was among those who visited him soon after his admission.

“He would take possession of unclaimed bodies for burial and would ensure that orphans who come to the hospital for treatment were admitted to orphanages. He was of great help in tracing relatives of patients who were abandoned at the hospital,” Dr. Pratap said.

In September, Mr. Sivakumar helped trace the family of an Assamese man who was found unconscious in the yard of Egmore railway station. After the man died at the hospital, Mr. Sivakumar traced his family based on a photocopy of a bank passbook found on the man.

However, on Wednesday when he died, there was no one at Mr. Sivakumar’s side. “It was sad that he became an orphan himself today,” the RMO said.

Mr. Sivakumar is a native of Ayalur village in Palakkad and used to take up documentation work in the real estate sector, according to his friend P.T. Ali.

K. Narayanan, who had known Mr. Sivakumar for the past year said he was taking care of his ailing elder sister who lived in Ayanavaram. Mr. Ali said he later traced and informed Mr. Sivakumar's family, who live in Thrissur, Kerala.

Thursday 07 November 2013



http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/man-who-helped-families-in-need-dies-alone-in-chennai/article5322779.ece

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Zimbabwe: Four Chisumbanje inferno victims identified

Relatives of 17 unidentified victims that were badly burnt in the Chisumbanje ethanol tanker accident have managed to identify four of the bodies.

Acting Manicaland traffic co-ordinator, Chief Inspector Cyprian Mukahanana said the bodies were positively identified before experts did DNA profiling at Mutare Provincial Hospital.

He said tests have been carried out on the remaining 13 bodies.

Relatives who were taken blood samples for matching with the corpses said they will know the results in the next six weeks.

Police will reveal names of those identified soon.

Thursday 07 November 2013

http://allafrica.com/stories/201311070211.html

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Mahbubnagar bus fire: APFSL runs out of DNA kits

After dealing with identification of the Mahbubnagar bus inferno victims, the AP Forensic Science Laboratories (APFSL) has run out of DNA kits to tackle any immediate eventuality. Realising this, the government has permitted the APFSL to procure 10 new DNA kits at a cost of Rs 40 lakhs.

According to APFSL officials, till now 34 bodies have been identified and eight more are to be identified.

"Considering the gravity of the situation, we have invested all available resources and completed DNA profiling of 34 passengers who died in the mishap. In the remaining eight cases, DNA profiling of six bodies will be completed by Wednesday evening, while in the other two cases, the family members concerned are yet to give their blood samples,'' APFSL in-charge director Sharada told TOI.

Though 45 persons, including a baby, died aboard the bus on the fateful day, three victims were identified at the scene of accident and the remaining 42 bodies were preserved since a decision was taken to conduct DNA profiling before the remains were to be handed over to the families concerned.

"In the case of two bodies, blood samples of kin are yet to be collected. In one case, we wanted the victim's daughter and husband to come to the lab so that the daughter's DNA profiling can be matched with her mother and her father. In the other case, we want the parents to come instead of the victim's siblings,'' officials said

As of now, the APFSL has six DNA kits. With the identification process of 34 bodies completed, the officials were confident that they could manage to profile the remaining eight bodies with the available kits. However, they were worried about the future requirements since DNA profiling in criminal cases from across the state land at the APFSL.

The internal parts of the most of the Volvo mishap victims were reduced to ashes and drawing tissues turned out to be a tough task. Generally, in other cases the officials of APFSL take around 20 days to conclude profiling of the victim, but in this case they completed it in just five days.

Meanwhile, forensic officials ruled out existence of firecrackers and other combustible material in the bus at the time of the accident. Sources said that fire was triggered after diesel tank hit a culvert and immediately luggage inside the bus, kept in an exclusive luggage slot near the fuel tank caught fire, and later spread to the entire bus, killing 45 people and injuring seven others.

Wednesday 06 November 2013

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/APFSL-runs-out-of-DNA-kits/articleshow/25290124.cms

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Mass grave in Bosnia 'could be the largest' from 1990s

A group dedicated to finding the bodies of those who've disappeared during armed conflict says a mass grave it's excavating in Bosnia could be the largest from the war there in the 1990s.

The International Commission on Missing Persons says there could be up to 600 people buried at the site.

The Commission's Adam Boys says almost 250 complete bodies and 110 body parts have already been removed from a primary grave at the site, near the village of Tomasica.

The remains discovered so far are yet to be accurately identified.

Mr Boys says the grave forms part of the criminal prosecution against Ratko Mladic, the general in charge of the Bosnian-Serb army during the conflict.

He told Ildi Amon, it is extremely difficult work for those doing the excavations, because the remains are very well-preserved.

Wednesday 06 November 2013

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/11/06/mass-grave-bosnia-could-be-largest-1990s

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Israel conducts DNA tests to identify Palestinian fighters

Israel has completed DNA tests to identify the bodies of 36 Palestinian fighters held in Israeli custody, a spokesperson from a campaign to retrieve the bodies said.

Salim Khilla from the Palestinian national campaign to restore martyrs bodies told Ma'an Tuesday that relatives of the fighters traveled to the Tayba crossing in Tulkarem to give DNA samples which Israel will match with the remains of the bodies it holds in custody.

The results will be announced in two to eight weeks, at which point Israel is expected to return the fighters in groups.

In August, the Palestinian Authority refused to receive the remains of Palestinian fighters held by Israel because its request for DNA testing was denied.

Since the 1960s, Israel has withheld the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, interred in numbered, rather than named, graves in a cemetery in the occupied West Bank's Jordan Valley.

The PA is aware of at least 288 Palestinian bodies being held by Israel, Khilla said, despite Israel claiming it only has 80 bodies.

Wednesday 06 November 2013

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=644555

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Mahabubnagar bus tragedy: 15 more bodies identified by DNA

The identification of Palem bus accident victims picked up momentum with the help of DNA profiling as most of the 42 remains were identified except eight as on Tuesday.

“The remaining eight bodies, including four in which finding a DNA containing tissue is proving impossible, will also be matched to their blood relatives and will be handed over, completing the whole process,” said Mahabubnagar DRDA Project Director Chandrasekhar.

All of the 19 bodies, except two, identified on Monday have been handed over to their kin on Tuesday. Relatives of the four victims from Karnataka out of the 19 identified have also claimed the bodies.

However, the kin of the victims who expected some announcement on ex-gratia from Andhra Pradesh government were left disappointed. “We demand Rs 20 lakh ex-gratia as we have lost an earning member of our family with bright future. They should also give a government job to an eligible person in his immediate family,” Adari Krishna, a victim's father, said.

As many as 45 persons perished in the accident that occurred on October 30 in Palem of Mahbubnagar district. Three bodies were identified on the first day and were handed over to the relatives. Another 19 were identified on Monday and 15 on Tuesday taking the total of identified persons to 37.

Meanwhile, the CLUES team of AP police in its report to SP of Mahbubnagar district ruled out any sabotage and also any presence of crackers in the bus. However, the investigators felt that the accident occurred as the driver rammed the bus to the peculiar culvert wall on the right side of the bus, resulting in the bursting of fuel tank.

As the luggage section, which caught fire, was under the seats the driver might have failed to notice it spreading upwards.

Wednesday 06 November 2013

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/367245/bus-inferno-15-more-victims.html

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Japan: Dentist helps identify mudslide victims

After typhoon-triggered mudslides hit Tokyo’s Izu Oshima island last month, a local dentist is striving to bring victims back to their families by identifying the bodies with his forensic dentistry expertise.

The Metropolitan Police Department has dispatched coroners to the island for body identification. Records at a local dental clinic have contributed to the work.

“I can recognize my patients by looking at their teeth,” said Ayumu Okayama, who operates a dental clinic in the town of Oshima hit hard by Typhoon No. 26 in mid-October.

A native of Nerima Ward, Tokyo, the 52-year-old Okayama opened the clinic 20 years ago in the town where his grandmother lived. An average of 20 patients visit his clinic a day, and he has examined more than 5,000 people on the island so far.

On Oct. 17, a day after the mudslides occurred, Okayama was asked to help identify the body of a man. He received a phone call from the son of a patient, who had visited his clinic for treatment until September. The son asked Okayama, “As my father received treatment at your clinic, could you identify his body? ”

Okayama then went to the morgue and saw the victim’s face, which looked just how it was when the man was alive. The man still had a gentle expression on his face that he always wore.

“The victim’s family could have recognized him immediately, but I think they didn’t want to believe it was him,” Okayama said.

After conducting dental identification, he told the family, “[The victim] must be him.” The bereaved family then thanked Okayama and bowed deeply.

Two days later, Okayama carried out another dental identification on a female victim at the request of the MPD. Just by looking at her teeth, he knew the victim was one of his patients.

“Dentists have their own ways of drilling and filling, so we recognize people we’ve worked on,” he said.

After referring to his office’s dental records, it was confirmed that the victim’s teeth matched those of a patient he examined several years ago.

“Dentists should not only fix teeth, but also face their patients, even after their death,” Okayama said.

When he was a dental university student, Okayama joined a team to carry out dental identification on victims of the crash of a Japan Airlines jet in 1985 upon the request of an acquaintance who is also a dentist and went to the same university. He climbed Mt. Osutaka in Gunma Prefecture to reach the crash site, where he checked the victims’ teeth with dental records. The bodies of the victims were unrecognizable, making teeth the key to identifying the victims. Okayama said helping to identify victims of the mudslides in Oshima reminds him of his experience on Mt. Osutaka.

Six of those who were killed by the mudslides, or went missing, are his patients.

“I have been able to work as a dentist thanks to support from residents of the island,” Okayama said. “I want [the victims] to be returned to their families as soon as possible.”

Wednesday 06 November 2013

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000763015

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Nine people feared dead as landslide hits Papua New Guinea

Nine people were feared dead Monday after a landslide tore through a village in Papua New Guinea's rugged Highlands region burying homes, reports said.

Villagers were sleeping when the massive slip of earth, trees and debris crashed down a mountain side on Saturday night onto Kenagi village on the border of Eastern Highlands province, the Post Courier newspaper said.

Local councillor David Nondo said one body, of a 10-year-old boy, had been recovered but it would take days to dig up the dead from the landslide which cut the crucial Highlands Highway.

"The area is now a burial ground and we do not want people passing through at will," Nondo told the paper.

"This means nothing -- trucks, buses and passengers -- is allowed to go into or drive over the area on the highway."

The Post-Courier said eight houses were buried, with three people rushed to hospital in serious conditions after being injured in the accident.

Provincial Police Commander John Kale told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that heavy rain appeared to have caused the disaster, which was followed by a second collapse on Sunday morning.

"There is a very big landslide starting from the top of the mountain past the road and all the way down to the river," he said.

Torrential rains have caused landslips in the Eastern Highlands before, with at least seven people killed in 2009 when one engulfed two buses and three houses.

In January 2012, as many as 60 people died when a massive landslide wiped out an entire village in the Southern Highlands.

Tuesday 05 November 2013

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/19677680/png-landslide-kills-nine/

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Bus accident in Sri Lanka leaves 10 dead

Adding to the list of bus tragedies, yet another bus plunged down a cliff in Sri Lanka, killing 10 and injuring many others.

At least 10 people were killed and 18 others injured when a bus skidded off a road and plunged down a cliff in central Sri Lanka, police said on Tuesday.

According to a police statement the bus from a state-owned company was travelling along a mountain road in the central hill town of Bandarawela when it veered off the road and fell down a 350-foot precipice on Monday night.

Five women and five men were killed, while the 18 injured included the driver and the conductor, the statement said. Investigations are on to find the cause of the crash.

Rescue operations were hampered by heavy rain and poor visibility.

Tuesday 05 November 2013

http://news.oneindia.in/international/sri-lanka-bus-falls-from-cliff-10-killed-several-injured-1335995.html

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No sign of more survivors in Myanmar boat sinking

Family members are scouring the coastline off western Myanmar a day after a boat carrying at least 70 Muslim Rohingya capsized. Only eight people are believed to have survived.

The overloaded boat was in the Bay of Bengal and headed for Bangladesh when it sank early Sunday, just four hours into the journey.

Community leader Aung Win says many women and children were on board and were hoping to reach third countries.

He says there were no new reports of survivors Monday. Only a few bodies have been recovered.

Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation, has been gripped by sectarian violence in the last year. Many of the 240 people killed and 240,000 others forced to flee their homes have been Rohingya.

Aid agencies have warned of a growing exodus of Rohingyas, who have been displaced by communal violence, attempting the dangerous sea journey.

The boat was thought to be bound for Malaysia, where thousands of Rohingyas have sought sanctuary since violent clashes with Buddhists erupted last year.

Over the past two years, hundreds of thousands of minority Muslims have been forced to flee Burma.

The United Nations describes them as a persecuted religious and linguistic minority from western Burma.

The Burmese government, on the other hand, says they are relatively recent migrants from the Indian sub-continent.

Neighbouring Bangladesh already hosts several hundred thousand refugees from Burma and says it cannot take any more.

Many Rohingya Muslims are living in tents or temporary camps.

Aid agencies say the relentlessly grim conditions will push record numbers out to sea, in flimsy boats, where they are very vulnerable to bad weather, engine failure, or being sold by people-traffickers in Thailand.

The United Nations said on Friday that more than 1,500 people have tried to leave by boat in the past week.

The BBC's Jonathan Head in Bangkok says Burmese authorities have done little to improve the situation of the Rohingyas, despite repeated international appeals.

They are still subjected to forced segregation, denied access to schools and hospitals, and barred from travelling or having more than two children without permission, our correspondent says.

Rohingyas, whom the UN describes as a persecuted religious and linguistic minority from western Burma, are not recognised as Burmese citizens.

Tuesday 05 November 2013

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/nov/05/as-myanmar-boat-capsize/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24798448

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Sailors from North Korea die in sinking

A number of North Korean sailors were killed when a warship sank during “combat duties” last month, a state newspaper has reported in an unusual admission by the secretive state.

South Korean media said the ship sank during a drill, and North Korea's KCNA state news agency showed images of leader Kim Jong Un laying flowers at the foot of a memorial to the dead.

"Submarine chaser No 233 fell while performing combat duties in mid-October," KCNA said.

The article did not specify what operation it was undertaking. Information in North Korea is strictly controlled, and accidents are rarely publicly admitted or closely covered by state media.

The country's official media did not say how many died in the accident, but said Mr Kim had ordered "measures to find all their bodies", suggesting a high death doll.

The North’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun gave no figures for the number of dead. But photographs of gravestones in Saturday’s website edition suggested about 15-20 may have died.

The paper showed solemn-faced leader Kim Jong-Un laying flowers at a cemetery specially created for victims of the incident, who “met heroic deaths while performing their combat duties”.

The report gave no details of how the sailors on a ship identified as “submarine chaser no. 233” had died. It did not say where the cemetery was located.

After hearing of the incident, Kim ordered a search to retrieve all the bodies and gave detailed instructions on construction of the cemetery and gravestones, the paper said.

South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper said Monday that two North Korean warships sank last month during an exercise off the eastern port of Wonsan, killing scores of sailors.

Quoting a military source, it said the ships were a Hainan-class 375-ton submarine chaser and a 100 to 200-ton patrol boat.

“The Hainan-class submarine chaser probably sank because it’s old. It was built in China in the 1960s and the North bought it in the mid-70s,” the source was quoted as saying.

North and South Korea have remained technically at war since the Korean conflict ended in an armistice in 1953.

While the North’s military totals more than one million personnel, much of its equipment is aging.

Seoul accused Pyongyang of sending a submarine to sink a South Korean warship in March 2010 with the loss of 46 lives.

Tuesday 05 November 2013

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/sailors-from-north-korea-die-in-sinking.22602449

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20131104/DEFREG03/311040016/North-Korean-Reports-Warship-Sank-Number-Dead-Unknown?odyssey=nav|head

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12 dead in Colombia bus accident

Twelve people were killed and 35 others injured Monday when a bus ran off the road and plunged 80 meters (262 feet) to the bottom of a ravine in southwestern Colombia, authorities said.

The vehicle was traveling along a highway between the towns of Toribio and Jambalo in Cauca province.

“The bus left Jambalo with at least 45 people, the majority of them Indians, who had participated in the festivities taking place here,” the town’s mayor, Silvio Dagua, told reporters.

Cauca Highway Police commander Maj. Richard Sanabria said that the injured were taken to several hospitals, some of them in Popayan, the regional capital.

Terrain difficulties and bad weather in the region have made the recovery of the bodies difficult, the police chief said.

“There are (groups) from Toribio and Jambalo trying to recover the bodies. We’re waiting for the weather to improve to perform an overflight and decide how to proceed,” Sanabria said.

Over the weekend there were two accidents with similar characteristics, the first in the northwestern province of Antioquia which left five people dead and 25 injured, and the other in the central region of Tolima which left four dead and 30 injured.

Tuesday 05 November 2013

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=1148519&CategoryId=12393

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Eight killed, many injured in Bolivian plane crash

A Bolivian plane has crashed in the north of the Andean country, killing eight people and injuring 10 others onboard, a media report says.

The Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner aircraft operated by local carrier Aerocon caught fire when it tried to land in Riberalta in Bolivia’s Beni Department, near the Brazilian border, due to heavy rain on Sunday, Reuters reported.

“(There were) 16 passengers and the pilot and co-pilot, of whom 10 survived and eight died,” the director of the Riberalta hospital, Jose Luis Pereira, told reporters, adding, “The pilot and the co-pilot are in the gravest situation.... Seven (bodies) are (so) charred, we can't identify them.”

The small turboprop plane was carrying 18 people onboard when it departed from Beni’s capital city of Trinidad.

The Bolivian airline reported technical problems were to blame.

Bolivian President Evo Morales ordered “a deep investigation” into the accident and “drastic sanctions on the company.”

The latest incident follows another plane crash in the central South American country, when in 2011 four anti-drug UN workers and two Bolivian military pilots were killed after their plane crashed into a tree in a forest in western Bolivia.

Tuesday 5 November 2013

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/11/04/332936/eight-killed-in-bolivian-plane-crash/

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