A foreign organization formed to identify the dead and missing from the 1990s conflicts in the Balkans will send a team of forensic experts to Ukraine as the death toll rises more than six weeks after the start of the war caused by the Russian invasion.

Kiev authorities have contacted the International Commission on Missing Persons to help name bodies that might otherwise remain unnamed in the fog of war.

A team made up of a forensic pathologist, a forensic archaeologist and an expert in collecting DNA samples from bodies and families to cross-test is expected to travel to Ukraine early next week, Executive Director Kathryne Bomberger told The Associated Press on Friday.

They will identify the dead, but also document how they died, data that may fuel war crimes investigations in the future. identity of the disappeared.

“Having this centralized capability is surely because you have to think of this as an investigation into a gigantic crime scene that is positioning itself throughout Ukraine,” Bomberger said.

The team will have a lot of work to do when they travel to Bucha, where photographs of begging bodies in the streets after the withdrawal of Russian forces have shocked the world.

Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said Thursday on Ukrainian television that at least three sites of mass shootings against civilians of the Russian profession had been discovered. Fedoruk said many other people died and investigators found bodies in courtyards, parks and city squares.

Vladyslav Atroshenko, mayor of Chernihiv, said about 700 infantrymen and civilians were killed in the war in the northern city, and 70 of the bodies remain unidentified, Ukraine’s Ukrinform news firm reported.

The commission, known by its acronym ICMP, already has appointments with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and other anti-crime agencies such as Interpol and Europol for percentage of evidence. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan has already opened an investigation in Ukraine.

“We need us to be working with the Ukrainian government to kindly search for those crime scene sites to identify the mortal remains, so that long-term evidence can be provided for criminal trial purposes, not only potentially at the ICC, but also potentially. in the national courts of Ukraine,” Bomberger said.

The organization is at the forefront of new technologies in its meticulous body identification paints from the smallest samples.

“We have implemented a new extraction technique that allows us to extract more DNA from smaller or more broken bone fragments,” said Kieren Hill, head of the DNA lab. “This is an exclusive approach in terms of application in the context of the needy person. “

On Friday, a lab dressed in linens covered with blue plastic coveralls, hair nets and gloves were meticulously working on other cases, taking tiny bone fragments with tweezers and shredding their surfaces for DNA.

Icmp has an online portal where Ukrainians can anonymously report the location of the bodies and will help family members of the missing supply DNA samples to help identify them.

The commission created to track down the dead of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Its sterile, high-tech laboratories are miles away from the muddy mass graves where the organization’s experts first made themselves known among the decaying dead of the 1995 Srebrenica bloodbath of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

They helped name the bodies that, in some cases, were vandalized and scattered in various mass graves as Bosnian Serb forces buried and then reburied the dead in an effort to cover the lines of their genocidal to annihilate the Bosnians of Srebrenica.

The commission made sure they did not muddy the waters. The leader of the Bosnian Serb army, General Ratko Mladic, and its political leader, Radovan Karadzic, are recently serving life sentences for crimes that add genocide. Both men were partially convicted thanks to evidence accumulated through icmp.

Funded through voluntary contributions from governments, the organization has since helped national governments name thousands of others whose unnamed remains have been recovered from sites with more than 3,000 mass and clandestine graves.

He has worked at crime scenes and crisis sites around the world, adding Syria, Lithrougha and Iraq. The organization also helped identify victims swept away by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and extracted DNA from bone samples from 250 other people who died when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005.

Ukraine may become one of its most difficult situations to date, as the organization works with the Ukrainian government to investigate and build instances in the midst of an ongoing war.

“So making sure that this procedure is carried out according to the investigations, that those sites are properly documented, that the chain of custody is obtained, will be a challenge,” Bomberger said. active conflict. “

___

Follow the APs of the war in https://apnews. com/hub/russia-ukraine

More in this section

Privacy PolicyTerms of UseSubscribe to our newsletters

Follow