The Office of the Public Prosecutor issued national and international arrest warrants against those responsible for the mass graves in Tarhuna, and their names were circulated to all the detention authorities to take over their arrest and hand them over to the Control Unit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The Office of the Public Prosecutor stated in a statement received by “218News” on Saturday that it assigned the Public Authority for Search and Identification of Missing Persons to explore and extract the bodies from those graves and transfer them to the Forensic Medicine Department of the Center for Judicial Expertise and Research at the Ministry of Justice, which was assigned the process of inspecting those bodies and preparing detailed reports for each body indicating the cause of death, time, and the instrument that caused it.
The Public Authority for Search and Identification of Missing Persons was also tasked with taking samples from these bodies to conduct a match between them and the samples taken from the families of the missing, while the Public Prosecutor’s office indicated that recently, through displaying the collections and clothes of those bodies in the Forensic Medicine Department, the identity of some of them was identified and delivered to their families.
The completion of burial was done in the presence of the members of the Authority for Search and Identification of Missing Persons, which undertook the process of determining the place of burial and saving the coordinates of the grave in the Authority’s database.
The Office of the Public Prosecutor confirmed, “The Public Authority for Search and Identification of Missing Persons has begun conducting a matching process for DNA samples taken from bodies extracted from mass graves and matching them with samples taken from the families of the missing, after the Presidential Council allocated funds from the emergency budget to cover the value of materials of the operation supplied for the benefit of the General Authority for Search and Identification of Missing Persons and necessary to conduct and complete the matching operations for those samples.
The office said that confirmed results have been obtained for 7 samples and the identity of their owners has been found out, adding that work is still continuing regarding the matching processes for all samples taken from the rest of the exhumed bodies, and the Public Prosecutor’s office will officially inform the families of the missing of the results of the matching operations in succession upon completion, confirming that the work teams The General Authority for Search and Identification of Missing Persons is still continuing to explore and retrieve the bodies from those graves in Tarhuna city and transfer them to the Forensic Medicine Department in a timely manner.
