With nearly 18,000 earthquake victims still missing, China's police have mobilized an unprecedented forensic identification campaign to help survivors learn the fate of missing relatives. The Ministry of Public Security in Beijing organized crime scene investigators, police photographers and other forensic experts into 22 teams that fanned out across the quake zone. Their mission: to process unidentified corpses and establish a DNA database that relatives can consult in the months, or years, to come.
The scale of the task is huge. "We need more technicians and more chemicals used in DNA analysis. That's our biggest difficulty right now," says Wang Qinghong, vice director of the Sichuan province public security unit in charge of criminal forensics, who was assigned to hard-hit Yingxiu town in Wenchuan county, the quake's epicenter. Although the process of matching DNA from remains with that of presumed relatives takes less than two weeks, the sheer volume of data that needs to be logged is daunting. While every country has crime scene investigators - made famous by the American "CSI" TV series - China's DNA collectors bear little resemblance to those glam prime-time celebrities and their gleaming high-tech implements. Police in Yingxiu wore full protective gear while processing corpses in the disaster zone, usually Dupont protective suits replete with gloves, galoshes and mini-gas masks. With the lessons of the 2005 SARS epidemic in mind, authorities are obsessive about the need to prevent disease epidemics and contamination.
Moreover their working environment looks post-apocalyptic. In Yingxiu, not a single sound structure was left standing after the May 12 quake. Mountains of rubble tower two stories above the street, with smashed and upended cars poking out of the pile. China's CSI's are processing many more remains under much worse conditions than any of them have experienced before. While their labwork will inevitably involve precision equipment and lots of stainless steel at some point, some field personnel working on corpses used basic tools, including what looked like rusty wire-cutters, to remove items from a set of remains.
All survivors and easily removable corpses had been extracted within ten days of the quake in Yingxiu. Now bulldozers rooted noisily through rubble, and occasional BOOM's echoed though the valley when dangerously tilting buildings were dynamited, using shaped charges that caused the structures to collapse in directions that allowed soldiers and firefighters to remove bodies trapped underneath.
A three-man police team - including two trained investigators and a photographer - went to work after a long-haired woman's corpse was recovered from the ruins of a shop on one of Yingxiu's main streets. After police sprayed disinfectant on the decomposing remains, they searched for identifying documents in trouser pockets, then removed a necklace that might be identifiable by family members. The body was photographed from several angles by a forensic photographer. Finally authorities shooed away news cameras as the specialists removed three types of samples: rib cartilage, fingers and teeth.
Here's another contrast with the sanitized TV version of CSI: China's DNA collectors slept in tents in a sprawling military camp, and were compelled to cook their own alfresco meals of congee, sweet potatoes and beef stir-fired with red-hot Sichuan spices in a huge open-air wok. "At least it's better than the first five days, when we ate just instant, noodles, " says Zhang.
"This is the biggest job I've ever had," says Wu Dengchao, 26, a forensic specialist from another county in Sichuan; whose only comparable previous experience was processing the scene of a chemical plant explosion in which nine people died. Wu confesses to knowing little about the CSI television programs, though he knows of their existence: "Some were aired by Chongqing TV a while back, I think". Instead, he asks about the famous Chinese-American coroner Harry Lee who's been involved in high-profile celebrity cases in the U.S. Lee was a forensics expert in the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, and was consulted after the assassination attempt on Chen Shui-bian, who stepped down as Taiwan's president in April. "[Lee] is a prominent criminologist, not just a technician," says Wu, "He's like a hero to us."
