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From the 21st to 23rd May 2008, experts from the police of the G8
countries (among the others the FBI, the Metropolitan Police of
London, the Berlin Bundeskriminalamt), Interpol and the Academic
community gathered in Rome to attend the meeting, organized by the
Carabinieri Corps, in order to discuss the scientific, legal and
technical details of the L4V Software. L4V (Looking for Victims) is
the name that the scientists of the Carabinieri Scientific
Investigations Department gave to the project, developed by the
Carabinieri Corps and the Department of Statistics of the
University of Florence, aimed to resolving the sensitive issues
arising from mass disasters, either natural or man-made, air
crashes, war-time massacres and terrorist attacks.
The need for identification, with certainty and speed, of the high
number of fatalities caused by mass disasters, presents relevant
aspects of legal and social character. This complexity must allow
for the return to the families of the corpses of the people
involved and to respect the last wishes of the victims, according
to their religious beliefs. Indeed, in such many cases a large
amount of victims can't be identified just using the traditional
scientific methods, therefore requiring a complex cross analysis
among victims' and families' DNA profiles. At the moment, this
extremely difficult operation is sometimes impossible and prevents
the identification. A team made of biologists from the Italian
Carabinieri Scientific Investigations Department and statisticians
from the University of Florence worked for some years on the
solution of this problem, leading to the drafting of a new
technologically advanced application software.
The scientific tool, that fully meets the international standards
on the respect of ethics, human rights and privacy, allows to
manage and solve those situations, in which the identification of
victims so far has been deemed critical, such as in case the DNA
sample for comparison is not given by a parent or a child (standard
situation) but by an uncle or a half-brother (non-standard
situation). The ultimate objective is to obtain, after a period of
testing, the global circulation of the instrument to enable its use
in any case of serious disasters, especially in those countries
where such phenomena occur, unfortunately, more and more
frequently.
Attach:
International law references:
- Universal Declaration on
Bioethics and Human Rights;
- International Declaration
on Human Genetic Data;
- Universal Declaration on
the Human Genome and Human Rights;
Presentations:
- L4V international legal
aspects;
- L4V overview;
- L4V theory.
Papers:
- Some mathematical problems
in the DNA identification of victims in the 2004 tsunami and
similar mass fatalities;
- Symbolic Kinship
Program
- Issues and strategies in
the DNA identification of World Trade Center victims
- Development under extreme
conditions: forensic bioinformatics in the wake of the world
trade center disaster
- Human Identification
Software for Missing Persons, Scalable for a Mass Fatality
Incident: Building on Lessons Learned Over the Course of a Major
Disaster
- Forensic identification of
relatives of individuals included in a database of DNA
profiles
- Identification of bodies
from the scene of a mass disaster using DNA amplification of
short tandem repeat (STR) loci
- Comment on Schwarz and
Arnason: Estimation of Age-Specific Breeding Probabilities from
Capture-Recapture Data
- Likelihood Ratios for
Evaluating DNA Evidence When the Suspect is Found Through a
Database Search
- Identification of the
Victims of a Mass Fatality Incident based on nuclear DNA
evidence
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