LONDON; In all the confusion following the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, one voice came out loud, clear and uncompromising. It was the voice of Derrick Pounder from Scotland’s Dundee University, the first forensic scientist allowed into the camp after the world had waited to know what had happened there.

As Amnesty International’s scientist on the ground he found clear evidence that non-combatants had been shot during fighting in the camp which led to its destruction by the Israeli army; and he said so on national radio. It wasn’t the first time that this British academic had put himself in the firing line of a major news event, but it was probably one of the most dangerous.

Professor Pounder, head of forensic medicine at Dundee for the past 15 years, is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. A pleasant and chatty family man, he doesn’t look like someone who has rattled delinquent governments. He courted establishment disapproval for the first time during the late 1980s when he agreed to act for the families of the three Provisional IRA members shot dead by the SAS (Special Air Service) in Gibraltar. He has since worked on some of the world’s grimmest human rights abuses and his travels have taken him all over the world — Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Sarajevo and Srebrenica, scene of the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.

The trip to Jenin began with a phone call from Amnesty, which asked him to find out whether Palestinian deaths resulted from general fighting or were extra-judicial killings carried out by the Israeli military. But his journey to the top of his profession began far more prosaically in the Welsh mining valleys, where Pounder grew up to be the first member of his family ever to go to university. He took a passion for human rights with him to his medicine course at Birmingham University, and that passion has not been dimmed by time or by a need to protect his career.

When he first agreed to work for the families of the IRA Gibraltar victims, six months after he took the professorial chair at Dundee in 1987, he didn’t know that several other, more experienced hands had already turned the lawyers down because of the politics of the case. His work led him to be described by one senior Scottish policeman as not fit to hold his post.

He believes that without the tenure that professorial chair gave him, he could have been out on his ear. The automatic right to tenure for academics was abolished soon after he got his, bringing with it fears that academic freedom to express unpopular ideas was now on the line. The end of the cold war has changed the climate a lot and an interest in human rights is now even a career plus, but at the time he started, it definitely wasn’t.

“During the cold war, being engaged in this kind of work was detrimental to your career. But I had entrenched myself in the university so I was very difficult to attack on the basis of incompetence,” he says.

His trip to the Middle East is not his first; he is well known in Israel. He discovered the first incidence of an adult being shaken to death — a Palestinian shaken to death by an Israeli security officer while in custody. He also gave evidence in a high-profile retrial of a group of Palestinians who had been in prison for 14 years for murder. He has worked for Amnesty International over the past 10 years as a member of the medical section of its international secretariat, gaining expertise on the investigation of torture and extra-judicial killing. He is also a founder-member and former chairman of Physicians for Human Rights.

He was one of three people on Amnesty’s Jenin delegation who set out in a taxi from Haifa on the coast. They were stopped at an Israeli checkpoint after about an hour and a half’s drive and told to go to another check point, which then let them through after a three-hour wait. But the taxi wasn’t allowed to take them any further, so the last leg of the journey was on foot, along a hot and dusty track with 52-year-old Prof Pounder carrying 15 kilos of autopsy equipment.

He asked to be allowed to inspect bodies in the local hospital but was refused. He had to wait another day before a court in Al Quds granted Amnesty’s request to allow him access to the bodies.

There were 21 bodies that had already been identified. However, he couldn’t examine them without the permission of their families, whose whereabouts were unknown. This left him with five unidentified bodies to examine. Three were wearing clothing and footwear that indicated they were Palestinian fighters. Their injuries and pieces of rocket casing found with the bodies suggested they had been blown up, perhaps while trying to fire a rocket on Israeli forces.

The other two were different. One was a man of about 52 — past military age — wearing ordinary, everyday clothes and sandals. He had been shot in the chest. The other man was about 38, wearing ordinary clothes and soft shoes.

He had been shot in the back and the top of the right foot. The findings supported the contention that non-combatants died in the fighting. Now back at Dundee, catching up on his academic work, Professor Pounder is certain that his international human rights work benefits his students directly because of his wide experience of forensic work. “I have many anecdotes and I can use them to illustrate an academic point,” he says. The department has an international reputation and offers an MA (Master of Arts degree) to overseas students in forensic medicine. Two young Kosovan doctors were there last year with the aim of taking the skills they learned back to help them identify victims of the war.

His medical detective work in the world’s trouble spots clearly captures the imagination of his students but he makes sure they don’t get carried away by the drama of it all. “This kind of medical detection only works if you rigorously apply the science,” he says. “Everyone wants to be like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot — very scientific and precise. But if you become excited and lose your scientific discipline, you end up more like Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther. Intuition has no place. Science becomes a powerful weapon in human rights work. With it, you can pin down delinquent governments.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.