By Derrick Bryson Taylor
LONDON — On Christmas Day 1990, hikers found the body of a young woman hidden under a rug and wrapped in blankets in a park in the Netherlands, not far from the Belgian border.
The last weeks of her life were harrowing. She suffered physical abuse and likely died from exhaustion and starvation. She wore a red top and burgundy pants and was likely between 15 and 25 when she died. What was her name?
It is a baffling question that Interpol is aiming to answer through its new campaign, Operation Identify Me.
The goal of the campaign, which began Wednesday (10), is to identify 22 women the authorities believe were killed. Their bodies were found in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, and their cases have remained unsolved for years, some even for decades, despite extensive investigations.
These 22 cases are the ones that “investigators in each country felt the public could help on, meaning that they had the best chances of benefiting from a public appeal,” a spokesperson for Interpol said.
Details from each ‘black notice’, which are alerts issued to police worldwide seeking information about unidentified bodies, have been released to the public for the first time on Interpol’s website. The notices include various types of victim information, facial reconstruction images and pictures of certain identifiers like tattoos, jewellery and clothing. They are described with case names that read like the titles of mystery novels: ‘The woman on the boat’, ‘The woman with the flower skirt’, ‘The woman with the bracelet’.
Susan Hitchin, the coordinator of Interpol’s DNA unit, said Wednesday that the idea for the initiative was brought to Interpol by authorities in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
“We’ve got to remember that these victims, these women, they’ve become victims twice,” she said. “They’ve been murdered and then also their identity has been taken from them.”
The circumstances in which the women were found vary, with the oldest case dating back nearly 47 years and the most recent from 2019. A cause of death is not always known.
-New York Times
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