Published in Washington, D.C.
January 17, 2005
Foreign forensic teams unite
Squabbles muted to facilitate victim identification
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Ego-driven
squabbles among foreign
embassies and forensic teams
have complicated the
identification of tsunami victims
who died at this popular beach
resort, according to the head of
a U.S. Marine Corps
search-and-recovery team.
The situation was
straightened out only after the
Thai government stepped in and
ask all foreign forensic teams
to come together under one
agreed-upon procedure, Capt.
Michael L. Craighead said.
"I can tell you, it's getting
better. All the embassies now
are starting to work together.
All the teams are starting to
work together," said Capt.
Craighead of the Hawaii-based
Joint POW/MIA Accounting
Command (JPAC).
"So everybody has put their
egos aside, and they are trying
to make this work and get these
bodies home to their families."
In the early days of the
recovery operation,
"Everybody wanted to be the
boss," said Capt. Craighead, 35,
a Pittsburgh native.
"So you had problems, until
the government stepped in and
said, 'Look, this is what I asked
you to come here to do, and
that's to help to identify the
bodies, and we need to be of
one accord,' " he said.
Even the Thai government
was embarrassed last week
when a turf war over the
identification of foreigners
erupted between police and a
top forensic expert.
Porntip Rojanasunan, deputy
director of the Justice Ministry's
Central Institute for Forensic
Science, has worked around the
clock since the Dec. 26 tsunami
to identify and preserve about
4,000 corpses so far located
around Phuket.
International forensic teams,
the media and others have
praised her tireless efforts to
coordinate DNA sampling,
refrigeration of cadavers,
databases of names and other
work.
Last week, however, Police
Gen. Nopadol Somoonsub, a
"police legal adviser," blasted
Dr. Porntip's role, saying police should be
overseeing the forensic work, not her.
He
demanded that she turn over all her information
to Thai police and an international Disaster Victim
Identification (DVI) center that was opened last
week by Europe-based Interpol.
"It is a police job by law," the police general
said. "Other agencies [handling corpses] do not
understand the protocols. ... They have also
confused the public with their incorrect
information through the media."
Dr. Porntip responded saying, "If they want to
do the job, let them come and take the corpses
themselves. I just want to send those bodies
home, not to fight with any people in power."
On the American side, the identification work is
being assisted by the team from JPAC, which was
established in 2003 by merging a 30-year-old U.S.
Army Central Identification Laboratory and a
Joint Task Force Full Accounting unit in Hawaii.
The agency, established to account for
Americans who disappeared in U.S. wars or were
captured as prisoners of war, has developed a
high level of expertise from sending teams to dig
up bones of U.S. troops in Vietnam, Laos and North
Korea.
"Laos and Vietnam are pretty much scripted. We
know who we are going to find. We have an idea
of a search area," Capt. Craighead said,
comparing his search-and-recovery work there
with the raw and chaotic scenes in Thailand.
"With this thing here, the mass casualties, you
really don't know what you're going to find from
day to day. That's the big difference. Every day is
something new.
"You really don't know who you're going to
identify, who those people are, but your job is to
help them out," he said.
At least 5,291 persons perished in Thailand
during the tsunami, and Thai officials said half of
those were foreigners.
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Website and more Asia news by Richard S. Ehrlich at http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent/news.html