Belgium experience in disaster victim identification applied in handling terrorist attack at Brussels Airport 2016

Abstract

The Belgian disaster victim identification (DVI) team is involved in many investigations in our country. Indeed, this specialized team of the federal police oversees searching for and investigating criminally buried dead bodies, identification of unknown putrefied corpses, and more. The Belgian DVI team also assists with the identification of victims of mass disasters (natural, accidental, and mass murders). In this article, we consider the contributions of different teams (forensic pathology, anthropology, and odontology, federal police, and crime scene investigation) both on the scene of the attack at the Brussels National Airport (Zaventem) and in the laboratory work (autopsies, sample studies).

Keywords:

• Forensic sciences
• forensic pathology
• terrorist attack
• blast injury
• body fragments
• identification

Acknowledgements

We want to express our gratitude to all collaborating forensic pathologists, and all involved personnel from the Department of Forensic Medicine (University Hospitals Leuven – Belgium), the DVI, and the scientific police for their unwavering commitment.

Authors’ contributions

François Beauthier, Wim Van de Voorde and Jean-Pol Beauthier wrote and reviewed the manuscript. Philippe Lefevre collected the data related to Kosovo. Wim Van de Voorde and Jean-Pol Beauthier performed the supervision. All authors contributed to the final text and approved it.

Compliance with ethical standards

There is no research involving human participants or animal experience. In order with the particularities of this article (and the death of all the subjects), it was impossible to obtain any informed consent from all victims.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.