Font size: 
Handling and identifying the corpses were naturally problematic during the early days of the disaster. There are reports that local officials in the coastal villages, after seeing corpses drift ashore, undertook their own do-it-yourself recordkeeping of the bodies before burying them, fearing disease would spread if they were not buried promptly. They took photographs and collected identification documents from the corpses that were then presented to relatives looking for their missing loved ones.
Some relatives, regardless of how the bodies were identified, were allowed to claim corpses from the morgues, a method that could result in serious mistakes, according to pathologist Dr. Raquel Fortun of the University of the Philippines.
"It (positive identification) is subjective. Some of them are in denial so they are bound to make mistakes," he said of the grieving relatives.
During the early days of the retrieval operation, the corpses salvaged from the sunken ship, bodies recovered at sea and those that drifted ashore were not properly handled and scientifically identified. The agony of the relatives of those who died in the ferry disaster has been unnecessarily prolonged by the inability of the authorities to promptly identify the dead. This has exposed the lack of forensic and scientific methods as a routine part of investigations in the Philippines.
Authorities had to import experts from Interpol, who reportedly arrived on Sunday, to help local experts identify the bodies using up-to-date forensic methods. If proper forensic methods had existed in the Philippines, policemen in the locality could have examined the bodies. It is normally the responsibility of the police to ensure that bodies are correctly identified and that the circumstances of death are properly and factually determined.
In the case of the ferry tragedy, it should not have required do-it-yourself methods to identify the bodies. What if those buried were not passengers from the sunken ferry? Who will then take responsibility to explain to their relatives how they died?
When the storm hit the Philippines, there were reports of two other boats, a cargo ship and a small passenger boat, which reportedly sank at about the same time as the MV Princess of the Stars. There is some confusion concerning bodies found at sea, as they could have come from any of the three boats that sunk. In addition, there were reports of people drowning due to severe flooding, and their bodies could also have been swept into the sea.
Unfortunately, this mishandling of the dead in the ferry tragedy reflects the state of the country's investigative capacity. The lack of proper and effective forensic means for identifying the dead, as well as the cause of death, has long been a problem in ordinary criminal investigations. Victims of summary executions, for example, are rarely identified properly.
This lack of scientific forensic know-how has resulted in people employing do-it-yourself methods in the past. There have been individuals or groups which, without adequate skills, training or authority to do so, have been allowed to perform duties that should be performed solely by experts.
For instance, in General Santos City, it is the local funeral staff that collects identification documents, takes photographs of the bodies and stores the corpses. They also make public announcements over local radio stations – often merely describing the clothes of the dead – that they have unknown bodies recovered from crime scenes in their morgues. As a result, those who have missing relatives go to funeral parlors, not to police stations, hoping to find the body of their loved one.
There are only two forensic experts in General Santos City, one from the community's public hospital and one from the National Bureau of Investigation. The former is responsible for cases in the city while the latter has responsibility for Central Mindanao. Apart from them, forensic experts in the Philippines can be counted on one hand.
Consequently, using forensic methods of investigation in large-scale disasters, like the ferry sinking, are not possible. This current reality is a grave public disservice to the people of the Philippines, and in the case of criminal investigations, it encourages the use of torture to produce "evidence" to solve crimes.
--
(Danilo Reyes is a staff member of the Asian Human Rights Commission, a regional human rights NGO in Hong Kong. He is responsible for the organization's work on the Philippines. Previously, he worked as a human rights activist and journalist in the Philippines.)
