There was the horror of the moment, that of the discovery of several hundred bodies, including those of children and victims showing signs of torture. And then that of the after, faced with the inability for families to be able to identify a loved one killed. To respond to this, a DNA analysis laboratory offered by France was deployed in Izium, in eastern Ukraine, where 450 bodies were found at a mass burial site, in order to help families to find missing loved ones, without going through the grueling visual examination.
About fifty people showed up on Friday to take part in this DNA sampling campaign organized in the parking lot of a commercial premises. “I am looking for my father, Anatoly Matyshko. According to his neighbors he was killed on March 10 by shrapnel and buried in his garden. He was exhumed and taken to the morgue in Kharkiv, but another body was found in the same garden,” Inna Kupriyanova told AFP. “So I come to give my DNA to be sure that we identify my father well and to be able to bury him properly,” explains this 46-year-old worker.
Six months of Russian occupation
People with a genetic link to the missing or possibly exhumed loved one spend a few minutes in the small white mobile truck to provide a saliva sample, the others a personal item, ideally a toothbrush from their loved one. This “LAB’ADN” is a projectable device, developed by the Criminal Research Institute of the French Gendarmerie (IRCGN), allowing rapid genetic analyzes to be carried out on a large quantity of biological samples.
This first laboratory was offered in July by France, which must deliver a second to Ukraine by the end of the year, the French Ambassador to Ukraine, Etienne de Poncins, had recently indicated. Several hundred graves surmounted by a cross and a mass grave were discovered in mid-September in a forest on the edge of Izium, a city which was under Russian occupation for nearly six months before being taken over by Ukrainian forces.
750 bodies exhumed in Kharkiv region
After exhumation, 450 corpses were sent to the Kharkiv morgue for identification, the spokesman for the Kharkiv region prosecutor’s office said on Friday. Until the arrival of this device, the identification of the bodies of the mass graves of the war had to go through very difficult visual examinations at the morgue, as was the case in Boutcha, near the capital kyiv, in April.
This sampling campaign “helps us to identify the exhumed bodies, because they only stayed there for a day… Their relatives are often not able to identify them”, explains the head of the mobile laboratory, Victoriya Bulavina. According to the Kharkiv region prosecutor’s office, 750 bodies have been exhumed from various mass and non-collective burial sites since the area was liberated in September.