Interpol announced on Wednesday the launch of an unprecedented campaign targeting the public to help identify the bodies of 22 women found over the past decades in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, with the aim of advancing investigations into these “cold cases”.
Interpol announced on Wednesday the launch of an unprecedented campaign targeting the public to help identify the bodies of 22 women found over the past decades in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, with the aim of advancing investigations into these “cold cases”.
The oldest of these bodies was found in a motorway parking lot in the Netherlands in October 1976, while the most recent one was found in a municipal park in Belgium in August 2019. The national police have not been able to identify these bodies, partly because These women were not from these countries, according to an Interpol statement.
“It is possible that these bodies were deposited where they were found to make the criminal investigation more difficult,” the organization said in a statement.
Concretely, INTERPOL will publish on its website and social networks a selection of information previously restricted to internal use contained in the “Black Notices” intended for the identification of human remains.
A photo of each of the 22 victims will be published based on facial reconstruction techniques and elements of the location and date of discovery of the body, personal effects and clothing.
“All hypotheses for solving these ‘cold cases’ have been addressed. The investigations have reached a dead end and we hope that public interest will allow them to move forward” with these investigations, François-Xavier Laurent, Director of Interpol’s DNA databases, told AFP.
He added that “family, friends, colleagues, who lost contact with this person overnight” can provide information and provide “any evidence, however small”.
Laurent pointed out that the identification of the body “has two goals: to return the name to this person and notify the families of this, and to open paths to find suspects in the event of murder.”
These different files are “not linked to each other,” but share their “international context,” according to the Interpol official.
“Some of these women are believed to be from parts of Eastern Europe,” the statement said.
Laurent added, “The bodies may belong to women who decided to take a tourist trip, but they are also potential victims of human trafficking.”
This campaign, called “Get to know me”, may be extended to other cases later.
