Serge Eko, M.D
I graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (France) in 2007. I subsequently obtained a University Degree on Would Ballistics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University Claude Bernard Lyon I (France).
I joined the INTERPOL General Secretariat (Lyon-France) in 2010 as specialized officer (and subsequently Coordinator) of the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) Unit. My day-to-day work consists of establishing new programs to assist the 195 INTERPOL member countries in identifying victims of disasters and revising the INTERPOL DVI standards (Forms and Guide) thanks to lessons learned from recent DVI cases.
The operational component includes frequent missions to support member countries affected by natural or man-made disasters. Some examples are inter alia, the series of coordinated terrorist suicide bombings in Colombo (Sri Lanka) in 2019, the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 which crashed in 2019 near Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), the Germanwings Airbus A320 crash at Seyne-les-Alpes (France) in 2015, the Air Malaysia crash in the Donetsk region (Ukraine) in 2014, the typhoon Haiyan (Philippines) in 2013, the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi (Kenya) in 2013, the crash of a cargo plane in Brazzaville (Congo) in 2012, the terrorist bomb attacks in Kampala (Uganda) in 2010 etc.
Furthermore, since 2015, I am the point of contact of the ICRC for any DVI related matters. This important and fruitful cooperation is now extended to HTSM (Human Trafficking and Smuggling of Migrants), I-Familia (INTERPOL global database for identifying missing persons based on international DNA kinship matching) and IFRS (INTERPOL Face Recognition System).
