The painstaking process of matching corpses to the names of more than 3Â 000 people still missing since the tsunami struck Thailand has been disrupted by a turf war between the police and the government’s forensic team.
Thai police on Thursday accused Porntip Rojanasunan, the country’s most senior practising forensic pathologist, of failing to follow international standards of identification.
They said that at least 2Â 000 victims who had already been photographed, microchipped and sampled for DNA and dental records would have to be exhumed from temporary graves and re-examined.
But Dr Rojanasunan, the deputy director of Thailand’s institute of forensic science, insisted body identification was not a task for the police but “the duty” for her government team, and dismissed the police’s involvement as an attempt to seize power.
Working at the temporary morgue by the Buddhist temple in Yanyao, about 96km north of Phuket, she said: “The battle between the police and the ministry of justice is about power. Many organisations want to take part in this [identification process]. For me, if they work from the heart I will let them. If they just want the power then I will not agree.”
Rojanasunan said that forensic specialists needed more DNA from the living to help identify the dead. “Our work is about the analysis of information, finding relatives of the dead and calling on them to collect DNA. We need more DNA [from those relatives].”
The identification of bodies is being undertaken in two contrasting settings within Thailand. At the morgue by the temple in Yanyao, volunteers heave bodies into tents, the sickly smell of the dead hanging over them. It takes two to three hours to process each body, before they are tagged and stored in grey refrigerated containers.
In Phuket, police officers are hunched over laptops at the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) centre. Here, forensic experts, including Avon and Somerset, and Metropolitan police officers try to match postmortem data collected by Rojanasunan and others with dental records, photographs and DNA from relatives of missing people.
Both groups have a mammoth task. In Phuket, the multinational DVI team has not yet successfully used any of the postmortem data to match a body to the name of a missing victim. At the Yanyao morgue, Rojanasunan on Thursday identified just one more victim, a Thai, by matching dental records with dental checks of the body.
Volunteers at Yanyao admitted that in the chaotic early days of the identification process, those buried in shallow graves nearby only had “simple” DNA tests rather than the “sophisticated” identification checks now demanded by the international team at the DVI centre.
The volunteers said the mass exhumations were not a sign of incompetence but that they had been always going to occur. They had been forced to bury the bodies to store them in the chaotic aftermath of the tsunami because there were not enough refrigerated containers available.
All the bodies are now being stored in refrigerated containers, with separate areas for Thai and western victims, so that remains can more easily be repatriated.
While Rojanasunan said she would complete her work processing more than 4Â 000 bodies in a month, Nopadol Somboonsap, an adviser to Thailand’s national police bureau, said the police should take over identifying the dead.
Somboonsap accused the ministry of justice, for whom Rojanasunan is working, of not following international procedures, and said it was hampering coordination with overseas forensic teams at the DVI centre. Police will meet Rojanasunan and the DVI forensic teams from around the world tomorrow to draw up a new timetable and help determine the strategy for identification.
The bodies of the dead at Yanyao which have been sampled are to be towed in their containers to Phuket over the next month. They may be stored near the airport for ease of repatriation. When the computers at the DVI successfully match DNA data with the identities of the dead, embassy staff from the relevant countries will fly the bodies home. – Guardian Unlimited Â