Sunday Times 2
Forensic fiasco over MH 17 crash
On July 17, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 went down, killing all 298 people on board. The United States, Australia and European countries have suggested pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine shot it down with a “Buk missile”.
Two Dutch and two Australian specialists visited the debris zone after early attempts to reach the site had been thwarted by continued fighting in the area. Their visit was confirmed by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), whose monitors escorted the team.
Forensic experts face many difficulties in their effort to identify the victims. Reuters
A small group of international investigators finally reached the MH17 crash site in eastern Ukraine after several days, as Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister said she believed up to 80 bodies remained there. “We are determined to access the site, so that we can collect the remains with some dignity and return them to the Netherlands where they can be identified,” she said.
Natalya Voloshina, head of the village council in Petropavlivka, where part of the plane fell, said she had received little guidance from higher authorities about what to do with the crash debris. She said, “There were some human remains that lay for some days on the edge of the village over there. In the end they disappeared; I think some dogs carried them off!”
Several transport planes carried bodies recovered from the crash site to Eindhoven airport in the Netherlands. Forensic experts have the task of identifying the bodies, a process which could take months to complete.
Disaster victim identification in air crashes is often a complex operation. It includes extensive efforts well beyond a mere comparison of ante-mortem and post-mortem visual, medical and dental information.
Correct identification is essential to surviving relatives. It is necessary to discharge legal claims and obligations in relation to property and estate, and to prove claims for life insurance, survivor’s pensions, and other financial matters.
The duties and obligations of the forensic team, which include pathologists, dental surgeons, radiologists, scientists and fingerprint experts are many.
Pathological and other trace evidence must be collected and such evidence would be of relevance to various other statutory investigative bodies such as a civil aviation authority which would also be conducting its own investigations.
The identification of victims in a disaster situation is a straight?forward operation on many occasions, when the bodies are not mutilated or decomposed. It is generally accepted that compassion rules after a mass disaster such as an air crash, and no effort is spared to identify the dead and bring them to their final resting place, be it burial or cremation.
In the MH 17 crash the forensic team will find it difficult to perform visual identification as the bodies have started decomposing. Therefore, comparing a photograph with the facial features of a body is now almost impossible.
Peter Vanezis, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of London, and I faced similar difficulties when we investigated the crash of Thai Airbus A310-304, carrying 99 passengers and 14 crew members. It was travelling from Don Mueang International Airport Bangkok to Nepal’s Tribhuvan International Airport. It hit a mountain and crashed several minutes before landing on July 31, 1992.
A number of frustrating and misleading communications (due partly to language problems and partly to the inexperience of the air traffic controller, who was a trainee with only nine months on the job) ensued between air traffic control and the pilots regarding Flight 311′s altitude and distance from the airport.
The Nepalese authorities found that the probable causes of the accident were the captain’s and controller’s loss of situational awareness, language and technical problems causing the captain to experience frustration and the first officer’s lack of initiative and inconclusive answers to the captain’s questions.
The controller handling Flight 311 assumed from the flight’s transmissions that the aircraft had called off the approach and was turning to the south, and he therefore cleared the aircraft to 11,500 feet, an altitude that would have been safe in the area south of the airport. The flight descended back to 11,500 feet, went through a 360-degree turn, passed over the airport northbound, and crashed on a steep rock face in a remote area of the Langtang National Park, Nepal at an altitude of 11,500 feet.
The plane was scheduled to land at 1239 hours; although final contact was at 1242 hours, the wreckage was not sighted until 7 hours later. (For the details of the disaster see: https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_mbdZLqnraU)
Although it is desirable, whenever possible, that the pathologist attend and examine the scene of a disaster, neither was possible in this instance because of the difficult terrain and previous movement of human remains and other items from the site.
The hazardous nature of the terrain was appreciated within 48 hours of our arrival in Kathmandu. Tragically, one of the official crash investigators, a 64-year-old Englishman, died from coronary artery disease, probably exacerbated by the high altitude (11,500 feet above mean sea level). A French colleague of his suffered altitude sickness, but recovered quite rapidly after descent. Both had visited the scene of the accident only a day after their arrival in Nepal and, thus, had not allowed themselves enough time to become acclimated to the high altitude.
The flight had 23 Nepalese, 35 Thai nationals (including 14 crew members), 17 Japanese, 11 Americans, 5 each from Belgian and Finland. Others were from Germany (4), Spain (3), Israel (2), South Korea (2) UK (2), Canada (1) New Zealand (1) and Australia (1).
There were no survivors.
Recovered human remains, none of which was easily identifiable, varied in size from a small piece of muscle to mutilated bodies. Of the 97 fragments, only 15 were sufficiently, but partially intact, to be designated as “bodies.”
Facial identification was impossible.
Of the fragments and “bodies,” only 11 were positively identified. Causes of death, although all traumatic, could not be stated accurately due to the degree of disintegration. Clothing was useful in identification in five cases. Identification of a Nepali soccer referee who was returning via Bangkok after refereeing a match in Malaysia was one example. He was identified by the tie with the logo of the Asian Football Federation and other clothing. His wife told us that he has a ring in his right ring finger. It was not there. Obviously, it was stolen at some point!
Human remains varied in size from a small piece of muscle to an incomplete, mutilated body. No piece comprised more than 40% of a human body. A few bodies had badly mutilated facial features, none of which permitted visual identification. Of the human material recovered, 15 fragments were large enough to be identified as a major body part. Remains were in various stages of decomposition, some with larval infestation due to decomposition and many contaminated with aircraft debris as well as soil and vegetation from the terrain.
Dental identification, as is usually the case, proved to be the most useful of the different methods employed, including DNA analysis of contaminated and degraded tissues. Five passengers were identified using dental records sent to us from abroad. DNA was used to identify three and tattoo marks helped to identify two.
Injuries were entirely compatible with frontal impact, and consisted of typical facial disintegration, with relative preservation of the back of the head in many cases. Injuries to the vertebral columns indicated that passengers had been seated with their seat belts fastened.
Cause of death in all cases was multiple injuries following high velocity blunt impact. In fact, cause of death could be stated more accurately as disintegration (i.e., a degree of injury that prohibits systemic post-mortem examination). As expected, autopsies did not help to determine the cause of the crash. Since body fragments of crew members could not be specifically identified, no toxicological analysis could be performed.
We were, therefore, unable to say if there were any physical impediments among the crew that may have led to the disaster. Nevertheless, it was clear that neither fire nor explosives was responsible for the crash. The forensic teams investigating the MH 17 crash will face similar problems in the identification of the dead and determining the cause for the crash.