Liberation of Kosovo: `Nose' on the case

A DUTCH army officer renowned for his ability to sniff out corpses will join a military identification and recovery team in Kosovo, defence officials in The Hague said yesterday.

Captain Harry "The Nose" Jongen, who earned his nickname by scouring Second World War battlefields for fallen soldiers, will track human remains near the south-western town of Orahovac.

It will not be his first trip to the Balkans. In 1993, the United Nations asked him to travel to the region to assist the war-crimes tribunal in investigating earlier atrocities. He discovered a grave containing 19 bodies north of Zagreb.

In Belgium, he helped locate bodies of the murder victims of the paedophile Marc Dutroux in 1996. Captain Jongen works by sticking a steel rod into the ground and then sniffing the end of it.