Ethiopian Informer
ADDIS ABABA: September 14 (EI) — The Interpol has disclosed the successful completion of identification of all victims from the deadly crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane in March 2019 is has disclosed.
On March 10, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plane crashed minutes after it took off from the Addis Ababa Bole International Airport killing all 157 people aboard the flight.
Some six months after the tragic incident, the Interpol disclosed the successful completion of the identification of all victims of the deadly disaster, saying that its team “helps successfully identify all victims of Ethiopia plane crash.”
“The Interpol Incident Response Team (IRT) deployed following the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane in March has completed its task, assisting with the successful identification of all victims of the deadly disaster,” the Interpol said on Friday.
According to the Interpol, its team’s role was mainly to coordinate the international police disaster victim identification (DVI) response and coordinating the ante-mortem data supplied by member countries, in which the Interpol’s Special Representative Office at the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa also provided coordination support.
“The IRT worked to ensure that identification efforts were conducted in accordance with international DVI standards, and assisted with assembling fingerprint and DNA samples,” the statement read.
The Interpol, mobilizing its global network of National Central Bureaus, mainly centralized the collection of DNA materials from the families of the victims to aid in the identification process, in which the DNA samples were sent to a specialized laboratory for analysis.
According to the Interpol, close to 100 disaster victim identification experts from 14 countries in Africa, the Americas and Europe supported the work of the IRT during its 50-day mission.
It also disclosed that partnership efforts with Interpol member countries and expertise from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) resulted in 48 victims positively identified by their fingerprints.
“In the wake of such a tragedy, the accurate identification of the victims is of immense importance to the families who are suffering from their loss,” the statement quoted Jurgen Stock, Interpol’s Secretary General, as saying.
“International cooperation and coordination is vital to these efforts, and this is where INTERPOL’s extensive experience in DVI provides significant added value to member countries when faced with a major disaster,” Stock added.
Grieving family members were also given bags of soil taken from the crash site as the investigation process is said to take some time.
Ethiopian Airlines Group CEO, Tewolde Gebremariam, confirmed soon after the deadly incident that the rescue team that was deployed at the plane crash site “was not able to recover human bodies due to the devastating nature of the accident.”
“It is really an unfortunate accident, I was the first to reach at the accident site on Sunday morning and when I reach at the place the airplane was entirely below the ground. There was nothing above the ground, and there were no bodies (of victims),” Gebremariam told reporters after the tragic crash.
“We only have very small fragmented human tissues, human remains. That is the most difficult part of this tragic accident,” Gebremariam had said.
According to the CEO, the Ethiopian Federal Police took “full control” of the human remains recovered from the accident site soon after the incident, while a U.K. based international organization called Blake Emergency Services, had been assigned “to help us with the DNA process, but as you can imagine it’s going to take a very long period of time.”
