NewPhilosopherforce. It may well be that it becomes
the coroner, or the procurator fiscal if
it’s in Scotland. Or it could be that it
is a government. When we worked,
for example, with the war crimes in-
vestigations in Kosovo, that was about
the government saying: “We’re going
to use your services to work with the
United Nations to do this.” And on
occasions, depending upon the case,
we will also be retained by the defence;
it may not always be the prosecution,
it may also be the defence.One significant case that you worked
on was the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.
Now, in this instance the government
didn’t engage you initially and you went
and worked for a private company. Can
you explain how that came about and
what kind of work you had to do when
you arrived?
When you have a significant mass
fatality and it happens overseas, often
you’ll find that the government will
put together a team that says, go out,
assist the international forces because
there are going to be some British citi-
zens involved and this is our duty and
responsibility to our own citizens. I
think the world was caught out by the
Asian tsunami, because as we know
tsunamis are much more frequent
when you go into the Pacific Ocean- I don’t think it was expected in the
Indian Ocean and I think everybody
was slightly caught on the hop. The
government initially said, yes, we’ll
have some involvement, but what they
did rather than sending out a national
team – because we didn’t have a na-
tional team at that point; we do now –
they sent out some police officers. But
there are private companies that tend
to work with airlines more than any-
thing, so when there’s a massive air-
line disaster they will become involved
with the recovery of the remains, the
identification of the remains, and the
repatriation of them. And there are
several big, international companies
that do this very professionally. So
they secured my services to go out
and to assist in Thailand. Fundamen-
tally the early stages of going out there
was about saying, How do we organise
this?, How do we get the processes up and
running? – because there’s always an
initial period of chaos, especially when
something can’t be anticipated and it
hasn’t been practised for and the re-
gion doesn’t actually have the infra-
structure to be able to cope with it.
There is that almost immediate period
of saying, What do we do, how do we
get the best out of this? Initially what
happened was that people were doing
what they thought was the right thing,
they were collecting bodies wherever
they were found – on the beaches, in
the hotel car parks, you name it – the
bodies were being put onto the back
of flatbed trucks and they were being
taken into the cities. And in the cit-
ies, the central focus of the cities was
the temples, so the bodies were being
taken to the temples. It was that rec-
ognition of the temple as somewhere
you would go to when you need com-
fort, when you need solace, it’s a con-necting and communicating place.
Of course, a temple is not in any way
prepared for the delivery of hundreds
of decomposing bodies. So there was
this initial situation where the living
needed somewhere to accumulate be-
cause they were looking for missing
persons, and the bodies were already
accumulating in the temples, so the
temples became this place of focus
for both the living and the dead. They
were ill-equipped to be able to deal
with that. And when we first arrived
the bodies were being laid out in the
forecourt of the temple and of course
there’s no refrigerated capability so the
bodies are literally decomposing in the
heat and the humidity of the environ-
ment. And of course you’re trying to
keep the insect level down, you’re try-
ing to keep rodent activity down – it
truly is almost Dante’s impression of
Hell and the Inferno.
You have families accumulating
outside, desperately trying to find fam-
ily members and so they set up initially
a mechanism whereby photographers
took a photograph of every body that
was delivered. And these photographs
were put onto computers and fami-
lies were going through photograph
after photograph after photograph of
the deceased in various stages of de-
composition. And bodies were in the
early stages being released simply on
the fact that somebody said: “I think
that’s my son.” And we had to stop
all of that. So, there’s two important
things: we had to stop bodies being re-
leased on visual identification becauseWhen we first arrived [in Thailand] the bodies were
being laid out in the forecourt of the temple and of
course there’s no refrigerated capability so the bod-
ies are literally decomposing in the heat and the hu-
midity of the environment.
The other side of life