US academics use radar to help seek missing in split Cyprus

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — U.S. academics who help locate Holocaust mass graves and execution sites in Eastern Europe have used ground-penetrating radar to seek burial sites on Cyprus of people missing since the 1974 Turkish invasion and earlier interethnic strife.

Team leader Harry M. Jol told the Associated Press on Friday that they scanned several pre-selected sites between Dec. 28 and Jan. 6, using a system that creates subsurface images without the need to dig.

Traces of ground disturbance from human activity were found among the half-dozen sites searched, but confirmation of burials would require excavation.

“Very few other methods have the resolution that GPR has and can map in a grid-like format,” Jol, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Geography and Anthropology Department, said in an email. “We used the same equipment for (hundreds of) surveys at sites worldwide.”

Jol said he passed on to the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) — an expert group that has since 2006 been seeking more than 2,000 missing Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots — information on where soil disturbance was found.

“It is these disturbances that we map ... be it buried building structures, mass graves ... unmarked (graves) ... and other structures," said Jol, who worked with assistant Joe Beck.

The data continue to be processed and interpreted in collaboration with CMP staff, while Jol said there are plans for his team to return to the east Mediterranean island nation in the near future.

Leonidas Pantelides, the Greek Cypriot member of the CMP, told the Associated Press that the team visited six sites where there was information that the remains of missing persons could be located. He said it’s hoped that the academics will bring additional equipment on their next visit...