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                    Scientists Search for Those Long Missing

   by Joe DeCapua

   Researchers are developing new techniques to find hidden graves. They
   say it would help locate the remains of a lone murder victim or the
   mass graves of victims of war. The research has been presented at the
   Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico, co-sponsored by the American
   Geophysical Union.
   Jamie Pringle Said, "There are thousands of missing people around the
   world that could have been tortured and killed and buried in
   clandestine graves." Pringle is a lecturer in geoscience at Britain's
   Keele University.
   "It's important for families obviously to find their relatives - to
   give them closure - so they can find out what happened to them and give
   them someone to bury. But of course also it's really difficult to get a
   successful criminal conviction without a body. It does happen, but
   normally it's more unusual. You get charged with something like illegal
   deposition of a body or preventing a proper funeral, things like that,"
   he said.
   He said that there have been a number of missing child cases in Britain
   where this has happened. It can be just as hard to locate mass graves
   of people who disappeared during wars.
   "[In] some of the Africa conflicts obviously it's very chaotic. The
   perpetrators don't obviously leave a map of where they've deposited
   people. Could be isolated graves or mass graves in a variety of
   environments and that can be quite difficult to find, I think,
   especially if there's some significant area to search and you have
   limited resources. It's really hard to be honest," he said.
   Pringle's colleague, Carlos Molina of the National University of
   Colombia, will test the techniques in the South American country. Many
   people there have gone missing in drug and other crime related
   violence.
   Molina not only wants to be able to find bodies, but evidence that can
   be used in criminal prosecutions, such as the time of death. To do so,
   he'll create simulated gravesites based on sites that have been found
   in the past.
   Pringle said, "He'll create some burials using normally animal cadavers
   rather than humans. Fill it in again and then basically survey them
   over set periods of time to see what technique works best and does that
   change over time. But obviously over time that gets vegetated again and
   often you get people called forensic botanists. They look at vegetation
   changes. It may be different plants might grow there or they might grow
   better perhaps if they're well fertilized to be a bit grizzly about
   it."
   The sites would be surveyed every eight days during the first month,
   every 15 days in the second and third months and then once a month for
   the next 15 months. Scientists will use instruments such as ground
   penetrating radar in their work.
   Pringle said that there's a specific workflow when trying to locate
   hidden graves.
   "Normal work flow is you go from the big scale -- some remote sensing
   methods, some old aerial photos or modern ones, in fact, or some sort
   of nonvisible wavelength data to see if you can see where things might
   have been disturbed. And then you say well those areas look
   interesting. And then, ideally collect some data over there and see if
   you can see if there's anything buried there."
   Forensic geophysicists from around the world, he said, are
   collaborating to solve disappearances stemming from conflicts.
   "The Balkan civil wars from the 1990s, trying to find some of those
   graves in mountainous areas in the former Yugoslavia, for example. I
   have colleagues in Spain looking for some of these civil war mass
   graves, which is a little contentious over there. There are some people
   who want to find their relatives and other people - maybe the
   perpetrators or their colleagues - [who] don't want them to find them.
   So there are colleagues working in Queens University in Belfast,
   they're trying to find some of these victims from the 1970s and 80s in
   Northern Ireland," he said.
   It can be a very long, slow and painstaking process.
   Pringle said he's currently helping to find the graves of some nomadic
   groups in West Africa before mining operations begin.
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   [1]http://www.voanews.com/content/finding-graves-14may13/1660815.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/finding-graves-14may13/1660815.html