Fantastic pictures Duxman. An encylopedia!

Thanks Duxman. You solved an old problem! Is it still there I wonder?

That is exactly what I meant, Andy. If you read through the Normandy Lancaster thread you will see the evidence that seems to indicate that, although very personal items were found, apparently no human remains were seen. I find that hard to believe, and would have thought that an official attempt should be made to re-examine this case and, maybe, enable the missing crew to be decently buried. Especially as we are heading for the 70th anniversary of the crash on D-Day, and all that entails in terms of official high-ranking visits and publicity. It would not be nice to think that this crew might have been lying there for 70 years and that no one had made an effort to find them.

Threads now merged – Moggy

and it is still not resolved.

My friend Ian Jones also thinks it is a British WWI Livens bomb. He says “It does not look like a German WW2 bomb as they used transverse fuzes”. He recommends http://www.bocn.co.uk/vbforum/threads/88620-EOD-Bomb-ID

As they know, I have offered to pursue this research, so maybe I could be on the receiving end. I would be only too pleased to try to take this forward.

Andy and Mark in particular:
Since the early days of this sad affair the “British” side was represented by the Defence Attaché of the British Embassy in Cairo. I indeed have dealt with two of them so far. The sequence of events was: the ARIDO team found some human bones about 8 km from the crash site. They claimed that the bones were left in situ and never recovered. I had offered my services to identify the bones with DNA techniques, and the family of Dennis Copping had agreed to this. However, the ARIDO link dried up, on the grounds that this affair had had too much public airing, and my attempts to find out locally in Cairo via my professional contacts there were fruitless. Then there came the report from the Cairo Defence Attaché that a second set of bones had been discovered and “tested” in Cairo (not by carbon dating), with the result that they were found to be “unsuitable” (although no-one could tell me who had come to this conclusion). I do not know where this second set came from, if it ever existed. Again, no information has been forthcoming from either ARIDO or Cairo (embassy or local pathologists). The Defence Attaché informed me that the case was “closed”. An MoD representative in the UK told me that their information came from the Cairo embassy.

I believe that if we could recover some human material we should be able to say if it belongs to Denis Copping or not. It is basically a simple problem, but seems to have acquired a number of political and personal overlays that I cannot understand.

Perhaps qattara can tell us whether to his knowledge the bones are STILL in situ in the desert.