Long, arduous scrutiny required to identify MH17 victims, says expert

Arduous scrutiny and more time. These are imperative for the forensic specialists handling the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) process to profile fragments of human body parts belonging to victims of the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH17.

Malaysia's DVI team chief Dr Mohd Shah Mahmud said it was a challenge for the 21 team members to meticulously decipher the identity of each victim at a Dutch military facility in Hilversum.

In one case, the team had to examine a human jaw which entailed a process lasting several hours, he told Malaysian reporters in an interview in the Dutch city of Utrecht last night.

MAS flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it went down in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine near the Russian border on July 17.

The Boeing 777 aircraft which was carrying 298 people – 283 passengers and 15 crew – was believed to have been shot down. However, until today, no one has claimed responsibility for the heinous act.

Dr Mohd Shah, who is Kuala Lumpur Hospital consultant pathologist, said at the military facility, there were two major groups. They are a DVI group comprising more than 200 personnel, including the Malaysian team, and another involving a crime investigation group.

He said the remains would be examined by the crime investigation group first to look for evidence of missile residue such as shrapnel, with the aid of X-Ray.

"The remains could be a whole body or body parts, contained in a coffin, and they would check it up, one by one," he said.

Later, the body would be brought to the DVI group for examination and there were three main identification processes which the group had to perform.

"The processes are fingerprinting, dental identification or odontology and DNA recording, where we would cut a fragment of bone for the test. We also have to photograph the remains as part of our report," he said, adding the procedures were according to the DVI international standard.

He said there were other international teams involved, including Holland, as the leading team, and those from Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand.

Another team member from the Malaysia Armed Forces Medical team, Brig-Gen Datuk Dr Mohd Ilham Haron said each set of remains or human fragments was considered as a case and would be tagged as a number.

To speed up the process, the 200 team members were divided into five groups so that each would examine a case, he said.

"The bodies or human fragments will not be dissected for autopsy... we just examine them as they are. The number of coffins does not correlate with the number of individual," he added.

He said the group was also given the medical history, odontology reports and DNA data of the MH17 passengers for perusal and for comparison with the remains, under a process called ante-mortem.

Dr Mohd Ilham said the team would also examine the pattern of injuries from the remains as it was believed the aircraft was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.

He said the team was looking for signs of injury or laceration, broken bones and burns caused by explosives, among others.

He said there would also be personnel deployed to audit the findings in ensuring nothing was overlooked or missed out by the DVI team.

Dr Mohd Ilham said once the auditing was completed, a report on their findings would be handed over to a central task force, including Interpol – based in the Hague – for further verification of the victims' identification, including DNA result.

He said DVI team worked from 8am to 7pm before they rested at a military quarters in the facility compound. – July 28, 2014.