Lessons From One Tragedy May Be of Help in Another

In a shabby building in this depressed Bosnian town, there may be help for Americans hoping to learn with certainty whether their loved ones died in the World Trade Center attack.

Not far from here, a crime of similar dimensions occurred. It was the most appalling massacre during the Balkan wars of the past decade: the July 1995 murders of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in and near the town of Srebrenica.

Much like the victims of the New York attack, they were buried in mass graves, their bodies fragmented and, in some cases, burned beyond recognition. Now the dead are yielding up their identities to a team of Bosnian pathologists, DNA specialists, forensic experts and computer scientists.

The team has potentially valuable technology to share with Americans: a new computer program that makes it possible to correlate, in a matter of seconds, DNA from blood samples of surviving relatives with DNA taken from the bones of the dead.

As such, the program differs from the more common approach of comparing two samples of DNA from the same person to confirm that person’s identity.

“This is different from matching DNA for crime victims, where you are looking for perfect matches. Here we’re looking for DNA profiles, and we’ve written a program that can match DNA profiles to a probability of 1 in 10 million,” said Edwin Huffine, an American who runs the DNA section of the International Commission for Missing Persons for the Former Yugoslavia, or ICMP, which seeks to identify the missing in the Balkans.

That means that analysts can say that it is 10 million times more likely that a person is the son of a particular woman than that he is not, said Huffine, who previously ran a division of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md.

Today, Huffine and two Bosnian Muslim colleagues--including the program writer, Fuad Suljetovic, who has never been to the United States--will be in New York to share their technology with officials in the medical examiner’s office.

Because it is not yet certain that the Bosnian approach will work in New York, the medical examiner’s office said it will not comment until the staff has reviewed the material, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the office.

Known informally in forensics as “kinship analysis,” such identification projects are new--there are just three in existence, according to John Ryan, a geneticist and director of forensic programs at Myriad Genetic Laboratories in Salt Lake City, which is assisting with the World Trade Center investigation.

The programs were created to deal with mass disasters in which there are no DNA records for most of the victims. In such cases, often the only way to identify the remains is to match DNA from a victim with that of surviving relatives. The most certain identifications can be made when both parents of a victim can give blood samples. However, it is also possible to compare DNA extracted from a spouse and a child with that of a victim, or even use samples from a more distant relative.

Such identification was impossible just a few years ago, when less was known about gene sequences and DNA testing.

“In mass disasters, you’re usually talking about identifying hundreds of people; here we’re talking in the thousands,” Ryan said. “The program developed in Bosnia was made from the outset to deal with cases like the Srebrenica tragedy, where there were as many as 9,700 people missing, so the ICMP has people who have a few years of experience under their belt dealing with a situation on this scale.

“They have a lot more to offer than just the computer program; their experience with obtaining blood reference material from the families and the organizational know-how for handling identification in a disaster of this size is really unparalleled,” he added.

While such DNA correlations are nearly conclusive, other information--such as shreds of clothing or knowledge of previous bone fractures--can also help in identification.

Dental records, rarely available in Bosnia, will also be enormously helpful in the New York effort. In the former Yugoslavia, dental records were few, and many of those that existed were destroyed or lost during the wars.

Huffine’s group is dedicated to helping families learn the fate of their missing relatives. About 40,000 people are missing in the Balkan conflicts, three-quarters of them Bosnian and, for the most part, Muslim.

The Bosnian and U.S. tragedies strike some painfully similar notes. Not only are the numbers of dead in Srebrenica and New York about the same, but the condition of the remains presents similar challenges.

However, in contrast to the outpouring of support for the U.S. victims, the ICMP has had to wheedle and beg for every cent in Bosnia.

“The U.S. government has more money than God, and there’s all this money and offers of help pouring in to New York from different groups. That kind of rallying never occurred here because of the ethnic tensions in the region,” said Kathryne Bomberger, the ICMP deputy chief of staff.

“For lots of these families, it’s been six or seven years and they still don’t know with certainty if their husbands or fathers or brothers are dead,” said Bomberger, a native of Arlington, Va.

Furthermore, until recently, there was enormous resistance among officials to reveal the location of graves in the former Yugoslav federation because such sites could provide evidence for the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. That has begun to change since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted last year, but there are still areas where local authorities resist.

Even when bodies were found after the 1992-95 Bosnian war, bureaucratic obstacles and a lack of resources hindered identification efforts. For years, remains were put into body bags and stored in unused tunnels that run into the Tuzla salt mines.

The Bosnian Muslim staff members of the identification project said they are proud to be called on to help Americans but saddened that the occasion involves such a devastating loss of life.

“Unfortunately, America is sharing tragedy with Bosnia,” said Adnan Rizvic, who runs the Family Outreach Program, which collects blood samples from relatives.

Rizvic, a mining scientist by training, became involved in the identification effort when he was working on an exhumation site shortly after the war. Relatives would come to the site searching, half hoping and half dreading that they would find a loved one.

“You want to help them, you want to do the best for them,” he said. “It’s enough to hear one story.

“You know, our staff is convinced that we are helping mothers--not Bosnian mothers, just mothers--because there are no words for pain or for loss, and they know no borders.”