Category Archives: Mass Disaster

WASHINGTON (KCTV) -The national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States is asking the families of those who went missing during the Korean and Cold Wars to submit DNA in the hopes of identifying the remains North Korea turned over to the U.S. recently.

NEW YORK — The U.S. military remains released by North Korea on Friday will be sent to a military lab in Hawaii, where they’ll enter a system that routinely identifies service members from decades-old conflicts.
Identifications depend on combining multiple lines of evidence, and they can take time: Even after decades, some cases remain unresolved.

ESCUINTLA, Guatemala: At an improvised morgue in the Guatemalan town of Escuintla, dozens of people stand around in an anguished daze, clutching photos of their loved ones, hoping to recover their bodies for burial.

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), whose DNA Laboratory was moved from BH to The Hague will start with profiling of the cases from the Western Balkans already in the upcoming month, when the new laboratory system is fully functional, as confirmed by Sasa Kulukcija, the spokesperson of ICMP.
To recall, the new laboratory was moved to The Hague at the end of December last year.

Nazareth, Israel – Thousands of Israeli families who have been searching in vain for answers since their babies mysteriously disappeared in the early 1950s – shortly after Israel’s creation – have been thrown a lifeline.

MARAWI CITY – Philippine National Police Director General Ronald Dela Rosa said the police’s Scene of Crime Office (SOCO) has started collecting samples from individuals who have reported about missing relatives.
Dela Rosa said the DNA sampling activity would help the police identify cadavers, which had been been retrieved and remained unidentified, and those that would be retrieved in the coming days.
The military has estimated 400 bodies strewn in various parts of the city. Some of them were civilians while most belonged to Maute gunmen and their allies.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Martin Ogando and his 91-year-old grandmother, Delia Giovanola, flip through a stack of photos until they reach an image of a man Ogando never saw in life: his father.
The two share similar skin tone and blue eyes — products of the same genetics that finally allowed Ogando to discover his birth identity through DNA tests in November 2015.
The tests showed that he’s the biological son of Jorge Ogando and Stella Maris Montesano, a child born in captivity in a clandestine detention center and taken away from parents who were forcibly disappeared in 1976 during Argentina’s dictatorship.

To lower the number still missing from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, the National Police Agency will begin utilizing a nationwide database on unidentified bodies as early as July.
The NPA will compare data on missing people in the three prefectures of Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima, which were hit hard by the powerful tsunami, with its database.