MOSCOW. April 2 (Interfax-AVN) - Identification of deceased servicemen is the most important task of forensic medicine experts all over the world, the chief forensic expert of the Russian Defense Ministry, Colonel Viktor Kolkutin, said in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta published on Tuesday.
Problems of forensic experts are similar regardless of their country, Kolkutin said. Excluding visual identification, experts manage to identify only 25 percent of killed servicemen in Russia and the United States, he stressed.
Regulatory documents allow a term of one month for the identification of a dead body, but the term is "approximate", the colonel said. "Sometimes examinations take several months and sometimes they are even suspended until additional objects arrive," he noted. The reason behind this is imperfection of identification methods and high labor input required, even though experts employ scientific methods based on computer technologies and genetic examination.
The most common method used in identifying remains of servicemen in various places, including in Chechnya, is cranial- facial examination, which implies comparison and alignment of the dead man's skull and his life-time photograph. "If an expert is competent, this kind of examination has quite high results," Kolkutin said. However servicemen's bodies do not always have skulls.
Unidentified corpses are buried in a few years. As to servicemen killed in Chechnya, 3-D virtual models of their skulls are made, samples of their muscular tissue and bones are taken before the burial. A DNA molecule can be extracted from those samples for comparative genetic examinations if necessary, Kolkutin said.
"An expert is personally responsible for his conclusion. It takes at least five years of after-graduate practice under the supervision of competent specialists to train an expert capable of working independently. Professionals in our sphere are aged over 35. At the same time a forensic expert earns as much as any military doctor, which is about RUB2,000 (USD64) per month," Kolkutin noted.