What is INACIF doing to make the autopsy and corpse identification process more efficient?

Santo Domingo—The Attorney General’s Office of the Republic (PGR) informed this Saturday that the workflow chart is being improved to reduce response times for delivering corpses and identifying unclaimed bodies.

The director of the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF), Sonia Lebron, spoke about updating existing protocols and integrating essential improvements, including interoperability with other state institutions. This will allow a greater range of action when trying to identify corpses, both those that arrive without being identified and those that, although claimed, the claimants do not have verifiable information that can be used scientifically in the identification of the relatives they are looking for.

In the same vein, he explained that Inacif is migrating to a new platform, in which it will work in real time and be interconnected with other state institutions, allowing real-time cross-referencing of information.

Lebron also indicated that the priority of the PGR is to build an adequate infrastructure with the capacity to process the demand for autopsies in the country, as well as the integration of more collaborators, such as forensic doctors, anatomopathologists, forensic odontologists, forensic doctors and other essential professionals to reduce the response time that we owe to our citizens, as well as to provide a better and greater service for the benefit of society.

In addition, Lebrón made it public that the bodies of those who have died so far this year and whose bodies have not been claimed by their families despite the constant efforts of the authorities to have them identified and delivered will soon be buried.

The head of INACIF informed that soon, the corpses that have been in the morgue for between one and five months without being claimed will be buried and said that this action obeys the established procedures, in addition to the need to maintain the physical spaces available to continue the work with the corpses that arrive every day.

In this sense, she invited society, in general, to go to the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF) if they have a missing relative to exhaust the rigorous procedure and validate whether the body is among those that the institution has in custody.