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Four years ago, the remains of a toddler encased in a lifejacket and a navy snowsuit washed up on a beach in southern Norway, having spent the previous two months being carried on North Sea currents. Though his face was barely recognisable, publicity about the sinking of the migrant boat he had been travelling on, and suspicions about his identity, enabled Norwegian police to locate a relative to whom his DNA could be matched, providing this lonely corpse with a name: Artin Iran Nezhad.
Others remain nameless. Of the tens of thousands who die trying to reach Europe, only about a fifth are ever formally identified. For their relatives, this lack of closure is a continuing trauma. However, a recently established network of forensic scientists is trying to change this, through the development of new technologies and processes to aid identification efforts.
Launched in November last year, Migrant Disaster Victim Identification (MDVI) Action brings together expertise from across Europe to address what its chair, Prof Caroline Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), describes as a growing humanitarian crisis of unidentified deceased migrants in Europe.
“It is thought that at least 25,000 people have died in the last 10 years crossing the Mediterranean alone, and that’s not even accounting for those who die on land and other routes,” said Wilkinson. “Only 25% of those are ever formally identified – and those are just the ones where the bodies are found. There’ll be thousands of other bodies that have never been recovered from those migrant disasters.”
Although there is no official record of how many people have died trying to cross the Channel, a recent report by openDemocracy estimated there were at least 391 deaths between 1999 and 2023, while the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) has already proclaimed 2024 the deadliest year on record, with at least 57 Channel deaths having occurred between January and October.
However, such figures are a “bare minimum estimate, especially because in overseas crossings, there’s a really high likelihood that boats just disappear”, said Julia Black, of the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project. “If they disappear without a trace, realistically, the only people who know that they’re missing are the families.”
Although it is relatively rare for bodies to wash up on UK shorelines, “sometimes they do, and the French authorities have also had their fair share”, said Det Supt Jon Marsden, the UK’s national disaster victim identification coordinator. “If you’re proximate to the event, you’ll hopefully recover an intact body, but should the passage of time have taken hold, it might be that you end up with either body parts or skeletal remains that need to be identified and repatriated, where possible. It is very challenging, very difficult, very complicated work.”
One issue is that, unlike in other disasters, the people are often not carrying passports or other forms of identification that could provide investigators with strong clues about their identity. Another is a reluctance by friends or family members to engage with the authorities in countries where they suspect their loved one has disappeared, despite being desperate for information about them.
Research commissioned by the IOM found that existing frameworks for dealing with missing person inquiries in the UK were not inclusive enough to support the needs of such families. Interviews with UK-based individuals who were searching for someone who had gone missing on the way to the UK suggested fear about their own immigration status was another common factor.
“I was really struck by one interviewee who said, ‘You can’t really be searching for someone else, when you have to hide yourself,’” said Black.
Until recently, countries have been reluctant to treat migrant deaths as disaster victim identification (DVI) incidents, meaning certain forensic protocols may not be followed and optimal data collection may not occur. “If it is a DVI incident, countries can also ask for help from Interpol and from other member countries, leading to more potential resources,” said Wilkinson. “If it is not a DVI incident, then the investigation can often be considered criminal, with negative implications for any survivors, support groups or families of the victims.”
However, within the past two years, migrant-related discussions within Interpol’s DVI working group have ramped up. According to Marsden, its deputy chair, their main focus is on linkage and support to programmes such as Wilkinson’s.
MDVI Action is primarily geared towards enhancing Europe’s capacity to deal with the thousands of deaths on its borders, through building research collaborations and increasing the number of people with the expertise to help with such identifications.
One of its initiatives is exploring the use of “secondary identifiers”, such as a person’s facial features, birthmarks, tattoos or piercings, as a legal means of identification. Although such features are informally used, dental records, DNA and fingerprints are currently the only identifiers legally accepted. Yet mistrust of authorities means that family members may be unwilling to provide samples of DNA for comparison with unidentified human remains, while fingerprint and dental records for the missing person may not exist.
Often more readily available are photographs of the missing person – perhaps even taken on their journey – which they may have posted on social media. In August, Wilkinson and her colleagues published a study in which postmortem images of 29 identified deceased migrants were compared with an archive of images taken when these individuals were living. Following a protocol they had previously developed, the researchers examined different areas of the face to see if they could match the deceased individuals to the correct living person. The overall accuracy rate was 85%.
Another collaboration that has grown from the MDVI initiative is the development of handheld scanners that first responders or charity workers could use to record deceased migrants’ features, before further decomposition sets in, boosting the chances of a successful identification. “The magic of 3D is that once an image is captured, you can change the angles, the lighting and introduce various artefacts that might make the face more recognisable to someone who knows the person, whereas a 2D photograph [of the deceased] might be more of a struggle, said Dr Frederic Bezombes at LJMU, who is developing the scanners.
Other recently developed technologies could be deployed to aid the recovery of people who die at sea. Speaking at MDVI Action’s first annual conference in September, Dr Tomasz Dabrowski at the Marine Institute in Galway, Ireland described software he had developed that combined predictions of ocean currents with models of how various types of particles behaved in the presence or absence of wind, to predict where bodies or living survivors of maritime accidents were likely to wash up. It is already being used by the Irish authorities to aid their investigations.
Dabrowski said: “Previously, you would have had to ask a local expert who knows how tides and ocean currents behave and interact with wind and air pressure in a particular location to predict the most likely trajectory for a missing boat or person.”
Although this technology is not funded by the MDVI project, and is not yet being applied to UK or French migrant search and rescue operations, Dabrowski said it held this potential, as the model covered the west of Scotland, Irish Sea, the Channel and the French Atlantic coast.
Research into such methods is just beginning, and more will be needed to establish its validity, but the moral case for putting a name to the thousands who perish while trying to reach Europe or the UK is enormous.
“This work is ultimately about the people who are left behind. They can’t grieve properly until they get the answers they deserve about their loved one,” said Marsden. “No matter how big or small the part of them they get back is, it is really important that they do. That is why we do this work, so that we can help to close that chapter for them and allow them in some way to move on.”
