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).