The importance of correct handling of evidence

Last April, I attended a very informative lecture by Peruvian forensic anthropologist Jose Pablo Baraybar on investigating extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances.

Sponsored by the Center for International Law chaired by Harry Roque, the US Department of State and the American Bar Association, the seminar in General Santos City had prosecutors, members of the military and the Philippine National Police assigned in Mindanao as participants.

Baraybar, who has been called on by the Commission on Human Rights to help in the investigation of the Nov. 23 Maguindanao massacre, comes with impressive credentials and solid accomplishment: he helped secure the conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori for his role in two cases of massacres in the 1990s.

In a historic decision last April 9, Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering the killing of 25 Peruvians. Fifteen of the victims were shot at a barbecue stand in the Barrios Altos area of Lima. Another 10 were abducted in 1992 from La Cantuta University and later killed.

The two massacres were carried out by a government death squad, known as Grupo Colina (Colina Group). In the Cantuta case, nine university students and one professor were abducted in a pre-dawn raid July 18, 1992 and shot in the head. Their remains were later found in an unmarked grave.

Baraybar’s group, the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) conducted forensic tests and DNA analysis on the remains in 2007 and also gave testimony to the First Anticorruption Criminal Court in Peru. Only four of the 10 victims could be positively identified, but that evidence was sufficient for the court to convict four members of the Colina death squad in April 2008.

More than 69,000 Peruvians lost their lives during the country’s 20-year struggle between the two insurgent groups, Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Army, and the government. About 15,000 people disappeared. The majority of the bodies have yet to be recovered and identified.

In that lecture, Baraybar underscored the importance of the proper way of recovering evidence. “If it’s badly done, it destroys evidence. You will not be able to reconstruct the event.”

He said “the way we recover things will assist us or define how we will interpret the evidence.”

He said material evidence recovered from the crime scene is not just “’stuff’. It is ‘fossilized’ human behavior.”

“The goal of a forensic investigation is to reconstruct and interpret behavior. When human behavior repeats itself and is patterned, it reflects specific activities. Activities are actions with goals; they are not random,” he further said.

This is important because in many crime incidents, including the Nov. 23 carnage, the public has been witness to the careless handling of evidence.

Romel Bagares, executive director of CenterLaw, which is a member of the Southeast Asia Media Defense Network, has reported from Maguindanao that, “Official autopsies on the recovered victims remains have been painstakingly slow and an acute lack of sophisticated forensic equipment and facilities, made worse by the haphazard handling by investigators of the crime scene, has made evidence preservation essential to a successful prosecution of the perpetrators doubly difficult.

“Officials of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines who visited the crime scene were appalled to see police Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO), assisted by government troops, use a backhoe to dig up the remains of victims allegedly buried by their killers in a newly discovered grave in Barangay Salman, Ampatuan town. They arrived just in time to see the backhoe’s claw unearth a woman’s bloodied and broken body.

“Authorities pulled out from the same mass grave the remains of DZRH’s Henry Araneta, and UNTV’s Victor Nuñez and Mark Gilbert Mac-Mac Arriola, it was subsequently reported.”

“Families of the victims, frustrated by the disorganized response of government agencies to the tragedy…Five government doctors–three from the National Bureau of Investigation and two from the Philippine National Police Crime Laboratory Service–had been working round-the-clock to conduct autopsies on the recovered remains of the victims. As of noontime Wednesday, they had completed work on only 10 of the bodies brought in from the crime scene 45 km away in Ampatuan town.

“’At the rate they’re going,’said Elliver M. Cablitas, whose wife Maritess, a reporter connected with the News Focus newspaper based in General Santos City, died in the massacre, ‘the remains of my wife would have long been decomposed before the government doctors get the chance to do an autopsy.’

“The lack of refrigeration facilities to keep the remains from decomposing is also complicating the grim task of identifying the victims and preserving evidence, according to Benito Molino, a veteran forensics investigator engaged by CenterLaw to assist authorities in investigative work.

“We have to move faster,” said Molino, who has spent many years in human rights work as a medical expert for the Medical Action Group and the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearance (AFAD). The government has not fielded enough medico-legal officers to do the autopsies.

“Molino also said,’I pity the government doctors who had to do the gruesome task. They have so much work with so little.’ As it often happens in the Philippines, government investigative agencies do not have adequate facilities to preserve human remains recovered in crime investigations.”

Baraybar is accompanied by British Chris Cobb Smith of the London-based Chiron Resources, which specializes on “hostile environment support”

A former member of the Royal Artillery, Smith has advised and escorted journalists and camera crews covering hostilities in Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo. He has also conducted investigations into a number of high-profile human rights and humanitarian law violations, primarily in the Israeli Occupied Territories and those controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Foremost among these were the deaths in 2000 of a BBC driver/fixer Abed Takkoush and in May 2003 of director and cameraman James Miller in Rafah, Gaza.

“His expertise is relevant in this case, “ said CHR chair Leila de Lima. Of the 57 killed in the Nov. 23 Maguindanao carnage, 32 were members of media.