Singapore police help with disaster victim identification in Nepal

KATHMANDU – As rescue and relief operations continue in Nepal following the devastating Aug 26 flash flood, a 35-member team of the Singapore Police Force (SPF) is on the ground to support the local authorities with aerial surveillance and especially disaster victim identification.

The team, which began arriving in Nepal from Sept 2, includes officers trained in fingerprint lifting and photography, as well as specialists in fingerprint examination from the Integrated Forensics Service under the Home Team Science and Technology Agency.

The team is still assessing the situation on the ground, said Assistant Commissioner of Police Patrick Tan, the contingent commander of the team in Nepal.

“For now, we are focusing on disaster victim identification as well as training Nepali police to operate drones to support their search and rescue operations,” he told The Straits Times.

Assistant Commissioner of Police Eugene Wang, the commander of the SPF’s Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team in Nepal, said his team’s mission is to help identify victims of all nationalities, not just Singaporeans.

“We are not able to isolate and say we target only the Singaporeans. Since the victims are of many nationalities, it is a collaborative effort, involving many countries.

“We are here to help in the collective effort to identify the victims so that we can bring reconciliation and relief to the families,” he said.

Nine Singaporeans have been reported missing since the flood, which has killed at least 1,300 people so far.

Wang said he was most struck by the magnitude of the situation. “More than a thousand bodies have been recovered, but more than 4,000 are still missing. That’s over 5,000 people of different nationalities.”

The SPF team also comprises a forensic pathologist and a forensic technical officer from the Health Sciences Authority, who both play critical roles in post-mortem examinations, documentation and sample collection for forensic identification. These capabilities are particularly important where bodies are decomposed, fragmented or recovered far from the original disaster site, making visual recognition unreliable.

At hospitals in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, SPF’s DVI team is collecting fingerprints from bodies brought to mortuaries, in coordination with the Nepali police, forensic and health officials.

Back in Singapore, the SPF is collecting information – such as X-rays or medical records obtained before the person went missing – from the families of the missing people, as well as DNA samples.

Wang explained that Singapore will provide the information to Nepal, which will carry out the matching.

Under the DVI protocol of the INTERPOL, the country that experienced the disaster does the DNA matching.

Besides Singapore, countries such as India, China, Japan, South Korea and Australia have also sent help, ranging from forensic identification teams and specialised tunnel-rescue experts to rapid response teams and logistics coordinators.

While the SPF team comprises members experienced in identifying victims following disasters in places such as Phuket, Thailand, which was hit by a tsunami in 2004, the massive flash flood in Nepal presents unique challenges.

“Typically in a flood situation, by this point, the body is badly decomposed. The body can be quite severely damaged, even coming in fragments. So that creates a lot more challenges in terms of identification and fingerprint collection.

“But we have been quite successful in collecting information,” said Wang.

Meanwhile, a crisis response team from Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has been in Nepal since Aug 27.

The MFA team travelled to some affected areas with the Nepali authorities to assess the damage.

Abraham Tan, First Secretary (Political) at the High Commission of the Republic of Singapore in New Delhi, said: “I think one of the biggest challenges has been the absolute devastation of infrastructure; 40km to 50km of roads have been washed away and at least 20 bridges destroyed.

“That has hugely complicated rescue and recovery operations as the authorities cannot access the actual flood-affected areas.”

The Nepali police and armed forces have had to use helicopters and drones, but this too has been complex in the narrow valley below the Himalayas, which has limited airspace for rescue and recovery operations.

“Our initial mission was to find information about missing Singaporeans who were caught up in the flash floods near the Nepal-China border. But we figured that we needed to support Nepal in rescue operations.

“This meant drones, supplies and information on last known locations or other data that could potentially help to narrow down the search,” said Tan, who is leading the MFA’s crisis response team in Nepal.

The Singapore Government has arranged humanitarian aid of $560,000, including essential medicine, relief supplies and emergency survival items, for the survivors, as well as for the Nepali government’s operations.

This will arrive in Nepal early next week.

Ten days after the flood, the priority for the Nepali authorities and international teams is twofold.

Even as they try to rescue people stuck in hydropower tunnels and those who made it to higher ground, they must simultaneously recover as many remains as they can.

Said Tan: “The families of the missing Singaporeans can expect that both the MFA and the SPF teams are going to do everything they can to identify and recover, if unfortunately, any of the missing Singaporeans have passed away.

“We will do everything we can to try and recover the remains, and, if requested, (we) can bring them back to Singapore so that the families can have closure,” he said.