A week has passed since the flood disaster left by Storm Daniel in the cities of the eastern Libyan coast, especially the city of Derna, where local authorities find a special challenge related to the management of bodies and the file of missing persons.
IFRC protocols indicate the need to quickly identify the agency responsible for managing corpses, with full powers and responsibilities, including gathering information, consolidating it, placing it in a central register, as well as communicating with the public.
On this basis, the Libyan Attorney General announced the development of a plan in cooperation with the Ministries of Interior and Health to identify the bodies of the missing and identify them.
According to the IFRC Disaster Management Manual, bodies should be collected and photographed as soon as possible before they decompose, in addition to collecting background information, registering them and assigning a plaque code to each body.
Bodies should also be temporarily stored for protection and to facilitate the identification of their owners, and a list of missing persons and information should be collected.
In 1984, the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), with the support of the Working Group on Disaster Victim Identification, developed the first manual for the identification of disaster victims.
The guide goes through 4 stages: the first is to examine the scene of the event, which can take days or even weeks, and then post-mortem data through forensic specialists to help identify the victim.
As well as pre-mortem data by collecting medical or dental records, fingerprints and genetic fingerprints, and then matching the information of the victims unless their identities are identified with information about the missing.
It should be noted that the Libyan case is characterized by the specificity of torrential rains and floods washed away by thousands of people, large areas, residential buildings and cars, which makes it more difficult to determine the true and final number of victims and missing.
In the eastern city of Derna, the efforts of the Libyan ambulance services, with the support of foreign teams, to search for the missing and the bodies of those killed by the floods, continue in the city of Derna (eastern Libya), amid conflicting figures on the total number of victims and missing persons between the relevant authorities in Tripoli and Benghazi.