Odontological identification of human remains from mass graves in Croatia

Abstract

This paper reports the results and methods of dental identification of 1000 human remains exhumed from mass graves in Croatia up to July 1998. Personal identification of the victims was performed at the Department of Forensic Medicine and Criminology at the School of Medicine in Zagreb. A forensic odontologist participated in the identification process by carrying out the dental identification. A total of 824 victims were positively identified, while 176 victims remained unidentified. Dental identification based on available dental antemortem data was achieved in 25% of the cases. Dental identification based on dental charts was achieved in 35%, on x-rays in 15%, on photographs of teeth in 22%, on interviews in 18%, and on confirmation by odontologists in 10% of the cases. Teeth, in combination with anthropological parameters, age, sex and height, as well as other specific characteristics such as tattoos, personal identification cards, clothes, jewellery and DNA, were helpful for identification of 64% of the victims, but the significance for the identification was not dominant. Only in 11% of the cases was identification achieved by other relevant means and teeth not used at all. Identification procedures in Croatia will continue until another 1700 people who are still missing or kept as prisoners of war since the aggression on Croatia in 1991 are found and/or identified.

Identification and analysis of human remains recovered from wells from the 1991 War in Croatia

“…The most simple are visual recognition and fingerprint analysis. In poorly preserved remains, or in the absence of useable dermatogliphics, the identification team tries to narrow the range of possible matches using basic data such as age-at-death, sex, and stature, and then to establish or reject positive identification based on forensic DNA testing [5,28], dental records [3,4,29,30], or comparisons of antemortem and postmortem X-rays [31][32][33][34].…”

“…The process of recovering and identifying human remains from individual and mass graves has proven to be the most effective method of resolving the fate of missing individuals in the former Yugoslavia [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. The primary objective of these efforts is two-fold: first, to identify and determine if possible the manner of death of the recovered individuals, and second, to bring closure to living family members, thus supporting the human rights of both the living and the deceased.…”

Age estimation methods using anthropological parameters on human teeth–(A0736)

“…The majority of the bodies were found, exhumed from the mass graves and identified. At the moment some 1100 persons are still considered missing-they are yet to be found and identified [17][18][19]. The lack of the medical and odontological documentation to be used as ante mortem data is the reason for continuous need of the detailed forensic-anthropological analysis of human remains with the aim to create the anthropological and dental profiles of the found human remains in order to enable the dental age estimation procedures [20].…”

Oral health condition of the Brazilian adolescents and its influence on dental diversity patterns for human identification

“…Other dental methods can also be used in these cases. 16 One problem that limits the use of dental pattern diversity for identifying human remains is the insufficient quantity or quality of ante-mortem dental data. 1,7,17 Other limitations of the present study include the lack of regional tables for the comparisons and the lack of data for other age groups that were not included in the epidemiologic surveys.…”