Thai agencies squabble over victim identification

Senior Thai officials squabbled today over who should conduct forensic identification of thousands of victims from last month’s tsunami disaster, in a quarrel that could delay the process of handing over bodies to grieving relatives.

The killer waves on December 26 killed about 5,300 people in Thailand, and left another 3,600 people missing. Among the victims were hundreds of foreign tourists, and some of their governments have expressed concern that Thai methods of identifying the corpses were not following internationally-accepted standards.

Since the disaster, the Justice Ministry has been conducting the painstaking work of identifying the bodies with the help of hundreds of foreign forensic experts.

But Police Gen. Nopadol Somboonsap, an adviser to the National Police Bureau, today said the police should be identifying the dead. He accused the Justice Ministry of not following international procedures and said they were hampering co-ordination with overseas forensic teams.

The head of the Justice Ministry’s forensic team, Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunan, said handing the operation over to police would be too disruptive because her investigators had already examined more than 4,000 bodies.

“I am the sole person who has the right to release bodies here and the prime minister gave me this mandate, so my work will go on unless the prime minister says something else,” Pornthip said.

Asked for comment, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the police bureau, Pornthip’s Justice Ministry team and Interpol had to co-ordinate their activities.