MH17 identity checks still feasible:expert
Delays in refrigerating the remains of victims of downed Malaysian Airlines flight 17 shouldn't hinder their identification, a forensic expert says.
Specialists should be able to identify even badly decomposed remains, said Dr Chris Griffiths, a forensic dentist and retired air commodore, who has identified victims of air crashes, the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
More than three days after the plane fell to earth over eastern Ukraine, pro-Moscow rebels began on Sunday to load bodies into refrigerated train carriages, according to reports.
Dr Griffiths downplayed concerns that the delay would hamper identification efforts, saying that in 2004 it took up to a week to recover tsunami victims.
"They didn't look very nice, but we still identified them," he told AAP.
Three methods are generally used to identify disaster victims: fingerprinting, dental records and DNA matching.
Visual identification is "deeply flawed" and isn't used, he said.
Fingerprinting is useful for victims from countries such as Japan and the United States, which have exhaustive public databases.
But for Australian victims, dental records are the quickest method, Dr Griffiths said.
Even the smallest dental x-rays are often sufficient to confirm an identity, he said.
"As long as you've got the right x-rays at the right angles, you could show them to anyone and they could match the shapes."
It is more difficult when bodies are torn apart by explosions or are burned.
In those cases, DNA sequencing is often the only way to confirm a victim's identification, Dr Griffiths said, which can take significantly longer.
In the case of MH17, he predicted some remains would be "fragmented" due to the explosion from a suspected surface-to-air missile.
But he said the bodies of most victims would probably be largely intact.
In previous aviation accidents involving explosions at high altitude, some victims who had fallen to earth outwardly appeared to have very minimal injuries, he said.
"You look at them and you think they could get up and walk away."
Dr Griffiths said it was difficult to predict how long it would take to identify the remains of the 298 people, including up to 39 Australian citizens and residents, who perished aboard MH17.
But he said most dental identifications after the 2002 Bali bombing, which claimed 202 lives, were completed within three weeks.
Fire is less likely to have corrupted the remains of the MH17 victims, meaning fewer are likely to require DNA analysis, he said, but much will depend on how long it takes forensic teams to gain access to the bodies.
