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Enforced disappearance

An enforced disappearance (or forced disappearance) is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support or acquiescence of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law. Often, forced disappearance implies murder whereby a victim is abducted, may be illegally detained, and is often tortured during interrogation, ultimately killed, and the body disposed of secretly. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability as there is no evidence of the victim's death.

Enforced disappearance was first recognized as a human rights issue in the 1970s as a result of its use by military dictatorships in Latin America during the dirty wars. However, it has occurred all over the world.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which came into force on July 1, 2002, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed at any civilian population, enforced disappearance qualifies as a crime against humanity, not subject to a statute of limitations, in international criminal law. On December 20, 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Human rights law
In international human rights law, disappearances at the hands of the state has been labelled as "enforced" or "forced disappearances" since the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action. For example, the practice is specifically addressed by the OAS's Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons. There is also evidence that enforced disappearances occur systematically during armed conflict, such as Nazi Germany's Night and Fog program, which may constitute war crimes.

In February 1980, the United Nations established the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, "the first United Nations human rights thematic mechanism to be established with a universal mandate." Its main task "is to assist families in determining the fate or whereabouts of their family members who have reportedly disappeared." In August 2014, the working group reported 43,250 unresolved cases of disappearances in 88 different states.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 20, 2006, states that the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearances constitutes a crime against humanity. It gives victims' families the right to seek reparations and to demand the truth about the disappearance of their loved ones. The convention provides the right not to be subjected to enforced disappearance, as well as the right for the relatives of the disappeared person to know the truth and ultimate fate of the disappeared person. The convention contains several provisions concerning the prevention, investigation, and sanctioning of this crime. It also contains provisions about the rights of victims and their relatives, and the wrongful removal of children born during their captivity. The convention further sets forth the obligation of international cooperation, both in the suppression of the practice and in dealing with humanitarian aspects related to the crime. The convention establishes a Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which will be charged with important and innovative functions of monitoring and protection at an international level. Currently, an international campaign called the International Coalition against Enforced Disappearances is working towards universal ratification of the convention.

Disappearances work on two levels: not only do they silence opponents and critics who have disappeared, but they also create uncertainty and fear in the wider community, silencing others they think would oppose and criticize. Disappearances entail the violation of many fundamental human rights declared in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). For the disappeared person, these include the right to liberty, the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the right to a fair trial, to legal counsel and to equal protection under the law, and the right of presumption of innocence. Their families, who often spend the rest of their lives searching for information on the disappeared, are also victims.

International criminal law
According to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, enforced disappearances constitute a crime against humanity when committed as a part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with the knowledge of the attack. The Rome Statute defines enforced disappearances differently than international human rights law: "[T]he arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, to remove them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time"

- (Article 7.2(i))

General background
The crime of forced disappearance begins with the history of the rights stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, formulated on August 26, 1789, in France by the authorities that emerged from the French Revolution, where it was already stated in Articles 7 and 12:

Art. 7. No person may be charged, detained, or imprisoned except in cases determined by the law and in the manner prescribed therein. Those requesting, facilitating, executing, or executing arbitrary orders must be punished... Art. 12. The guarantee of the rights of man and of the citizen needs a public force. This force is therefore instituted for the benefit of all, and not for the particular utility of those who are in charge of it.

Throughout the nineteenth century, along with the technological advancements applied to wars that led to increased mortality among combatants and damage to civilian populations, movements for humanitarian awareness in Western societies resulted in the founding of the first humanitarian organizations known as the Red Cross in 1859, and the first international typification of abuses and crimes in the form of the 1864 Geneva Convention. In 1946, after the Second World War, the Nuremberg trials brought to public attention to the Nacht und Nebel decree, one of the most prominent antecedents of the crime of enforced disappearance. The trials included the testimony of 20 of those persons considered a threat to the security of Nazi Germany and whom the regime detained and condemned to death in the occupied territories of Europe. However, the executions were not carried out immediately; at one time, the people were deported to Germany and imprisoned at locations such as the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, where they ended up disappearing and no information about their whereabouts and fate was given as per point III of the decree:"III. …In case German or foreign authorities inquire about such prisoners, they are to be told that they were arrested, but that the proceedings do not allow any further information."

German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was condemned in connection with his role in the application of the "NN decree" by Adolf Hitler, although, as it had not been accepted at the time that enforced disappearances were crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Tribunal in Nuremberg found him guilty of war crimes.

Since 1974, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have been the first international human rights bodies to react to the phenomenon of disappearances, following complaints made in connection with the Chilean military coup of September 11, 1973. The report of the Working Group to Investigate the Situation of Human Rights in that country, which was submitted to the United Nations Commission on February 4, 1976, illustrated such a case for the first time, when Alfonso Chanfreau, of French origin, was arrested in July 1974 at his home in Santiago de Chile.

Earlier, in February 1975, the UN Commission on Human Rights had used the terms "persons unaccounted for" or "persons whose disappearance was not justified," in a resolution that dealt with the disappearances in Cyprus as a result of the armed conflict that resulted in the division of the island, as part of the two General Assembly resolutions adopted in December 1975 with respect to Cyprus and Chile.

1977 and 1979 resolutions
In 1977, the General Assembly of the United Nations again discussed disappearances in its resolution 32/118. By then, the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel had made an international appeal that, with the support of the French government, obtained the response of the General Assembly in the form of resolution 33/173 of 20 December 1978, which specifically referred to "missing persons" and requested the Commission on Human Rights to make appropriate recommendations.

On 6 March 1979, the Commission authorized the appointment as experts of Dr. Felix Ermacora and Waleed M. Sadi, who later resigned due to political pressure, to study the question of the fate of disappearances in Chile, issuing a report to the General Assembly on 21 November 1979. Felix Ermacora's report became a reference point on the legal issue of crime by including a series of conclusions and recommendations which were later collected by international organizations and bodies.

Meanwhile, during the same year, the General Assembly of the Organization of American States adopted a resolution on Chile on 31 October, in which it declared that the practice of disappearances was "an affront to the conscience of the hemisphere", after having sent in September a mission of the Inter-American Commission to Argentina, which confirmed the systematic practice of enforced disappearances by successive military juntas. Despite the exhortations of non-governmental organizations and family organizations of the victims, in the same resolution of 31 October 1979, the General Assembly of the OAS issued a statement, after receiving pressure from the Argentine government, in which only the states in which persons had disappeared were urged to refrain from enacting or enforcing laws that might hinder the investigation of such disappearances.

Shortly after the report by Félix Ermacora, the UN Commission on Human Rights considered one of the proposals made and decided on 29 February 1980 to set up the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, the first of the so-called thematic mechanisms of the commission and the most important body of the United Nations that has since been dealing with the problem of disappearances in cases that can be attributed to governments, as well as issuing recommendations to the commission and governments on the improvement of the protection afforded to miss persons and their families and to prevent cases of enforced disappearance. Since then, different causes began to be developed in various international legal bodies, whose sentences served to establish a specific jurisprudence on enforced disappearance.

1983 OAS resolution and first convictions
The United Nations Human Rights Committee, established in 1977 in accordance with article 28 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to monitor compliance by states parties with their obligations, issued in March 1982 and July 1983, two sentences condemning the State of Uruguay for the cases of Eduardo Bleier, a former member of the Communist Party of Uruguay, residing in Hungary and Israel, disappeared after his arrest in 1975 in Montevideo, and Elena Quinteros Almeida, missing since her arrest at the Venezuelan Embassy in Montevideo in June 1976, in an incident that led to the suspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In its judgments, the Committee relied on a number of articles of the International Covenant, in particular, those relating to "the right to liberty and personal security", "the right of detainees to be treated humanely and with respect to the inherent dignity of the human being" and "the right of every human being to the recognition of his juridical personality", while in the case of Quinteros, it was solved for the first time in favor of the relatives considered equally victims.

In 1983, the Organization of American States (OAS) declared by its resolution 666 XIII-0/83 that any enforced disappearance should be described as a crime against humanity. A few years later, in 1988 and 1989, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights promulgated the first convictions declaring the State of Honduras guilty of violating its duty to respect and guarantee the rights to life, liberty, and personal integrity of the disappeared Angel Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez. Rodríguez was a Honduran student kidnapped in September 1981 in Tegucigalpa by heavily armed civilians connected with the Honduran Armed Forces and Saúl Godínez Cruz. Since the express definition of the crime of enforced disappearance had not yet been defined, the Court had to rely on different articles of the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969. Other rulings issued by the Inter-American Court condemned Colombia, Guatemala (for several cases including the call of the "street children"), Peru, and Bolivia.

Situation in Europe and resolutions of 1993 and 1995
In Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, established in 1959, in accordance with article 38 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950, became a single permanent and binding court for all the Member States of the Council of Europe. Although the European Convention does not contain any express prohibition of the practice of enforced disappearance, the Court dealt with several cases of disappearance in 1993 in the context of the conflict between the Turkish security forces and members or supporters of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) from the Kurdish region to the southeast of Turkey.

Another body providing the basis for the legal definition of the crime of enforced disappearance was the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a human rights tribunal established under Annex 6 of the Dayton Peace Agreement of 14 December 1995 which, although it was declared incompetent by ratione temporis to deal with the majority of the 20,000 cases reported, it issued a number of sentences against the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which compensated several families of disappeared persons.

Towards the 1992 International Convention
In parallel with the resolutions of the international organizations, several non-governmental organizations drafted projects for an international convention. In 1981, the Institute des droits de l'homme du Barreau de Paris (Institute of Human Rights of the Paris Law School) organized a high-level symposium to promote an international convention on disappearances, followed by several draft declarations and conventions proposed by the Argentine League for Human Rights, FEDEFAM at the annual congress of Peru in 1982 or the Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo from Bogotá in 1988.

In that same year, the French expert in the then Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Louis Joinet, prepared the draft text to be adopted in 1992 by the General Assembly with the title Declaration on the Protection of All Persons Against enforced disappearances. The definition presented was based on the one traditionally used by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Although the Declaration included as the primary obligation of States to enact specific criminal legislation, unlike the Convention against Torture, the principle of universal jurisdiction was not established nor was it agreed that the provisions of the Declaration and the recommendations of the Working Group were legally binding so that only a few states took concrete steps to comply with them.

The United Nations Declaration, despite its shortcomings, served to awaken the regional project for the American continent commissioned by the OAS General Assembly in 1987, which, although drafted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1988, was subjected to lengthy discussions and modifications that resulted in their stagnation. In June 1994, the OAS General Assembly finally approved the Inter-American Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons, which would be the first legally binding instrument on the subject, and entered into force on 28 March 1996, after its ratification by eight countries: Argentina, Panama, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Guatemala.

In view of the meager success of the United Nations Declaration, a non-binding instrument that could only marginally influence the practice of enforced disappearances, a number of non-governmental organizations and several experts proposed strengthening protection against disappearances, adopting a convention within the framework of the United Nations. This was followed by the deliberations of the 1981 Paris Colloquium submitted by Louis Joinet in the form of a draft subcommittee in August 1988. Several governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations responded to the invitation of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to provide comments and observations to the project.

The 2006 International Convention
On 20 December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the text of the International Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons after more than 25 years of development and was signed in Paris on 6 February 2007 at a ceremony to which representatives of the 53 first signatory countries attended and in which 20 of them immediately ratified it. On 19 April 2007, the Commission on Human Rights updated the list of countries that ratified the convention, which included 59 nations.

Report of the UN (1980–2009)
Since the establishment of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in 1980, the crime of enforced disappearance has proved to be a global problem, affecting many countries on five continents. It is the subject of a special follow-up by the HRC which regularly publishes reports on its complaint and situation, as well as the response and action of the governments concerned.

The report of the 2009 Working Group recorded a total of 53,232 cases transmitted by the Working Group to Governments since their inception in 1980 and affecting 82 states. The number of cases that are still under study due to lack of clarification, closed or discontinuous cases amounts to 42,600. Since 2004 the Working Group had clarified 1,776 cases. In the previous report of 2007, the number of cases had been 51,531 and affected 79 countries. Many of the countries in the cases are affected internally by violent conflicts, while in other countries the practice of repressive policies towards political opponents is denounced. In other countries, generally in the western and European hemispheres, there are still historical cases that remain unresolved and constitute permanent crimes.

In the official UN report of 2009, of the 82 countries where the cases of missing persons were identified, the largest number (more than 1000) transmitted were: Iraq (16,544), Sri Lanka (12,226), Argentina (3,449), Guatemala (3,155), Peru (3,009), Algeria (2,939), El Salvador (2,661) and Colombia (1,235). Other countries with numerous cases under denunciation (between 1000 and 100) are: Chile (907), China (116), Congo (114), Ethiopia (119), Philippines (780), Honduras (207), India (430), Indonesia (165), Iran (532), Lebanon (320), Morocco (268), Mexico (392), Nepal (672), Nicaragua (234), Russian Federation (478), Sudan, Yemen (155) and East Timor (504).

Algeria
During the Algerian Civil War, which began in 1992 as militant Islamist guerrillas attacked the military government that had annulled an Islamic Salvation Front victory, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared. Disappearances continued up to the late 1990s, but thereafter dropped off sharply with the decline in violence in 1997. Some of the disappeared were kidnapped or killed by the guerrillas but others are presumed to have been taken by state security forces under Mohamed Mediène. This latter group has become the most controversial. Their exact numbers remain disputed, but the government has acknowledged a figure of just over 6,000 disappeared, now presumed dead. The war claimed a total toll of 150,000–200,000 lives.

In 2005 a controversial amnesty law was approved in a referendum. It granted financial compensation to families of the "disappeared", but also effectively ended the police investigations into the crimes.

Argentina
During Argentina's Dirty War and Operation Condor, many alleged political dissidents were abducted or illegally detained and kept in clandestine detention centers such as Navy Petty-Officers School or "ESMA", where they were questioned, tortured, and almost always killed. There were about 500 clandestine detention camps, including those of Garaje Azopardo and Orletti. These places of torture, located mostly in Buenos Aires, contributed up to 30,000 desaparecidos, or disappeared persons, to the overall count in the Dirty War. The victims would be shipped to places like a garage or basement and tortured for multiple days. Many of the disappeared were people who were considered to be a political or ideological threat to the military junta.

The Argentine military justified torture to obtain intelligence and saw the disappearances as a way to curb political dissidence. Abducted pregnant women were kept captive until they gave birth, then often killed. It is estimated that 500 babies born in this way were given for informal adoption to families with close ties to the military.

Eventually, many of the captives were heavily drugged and loaded onto aircraft, from which they were thrown alive while in flight over the Atlantic Ocean in "death flights" (vuelos de la muerte) to leave no trace of their death. Without any bodies, the government could deny any knowledge of their whereabouts and accusations that they had been killed. The forced disappearances were the military junta's attempt to silence the opposition and break the determination of the guerrillas. Missing people who are presumed to have been murdered in this and other ways are today referred to as "the disappeared" (los desaparecidos).

Activist groups Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were formed in 1977 by mothers and grandmothers of the "disappeared" victims of the dictatorship to find the children born in captivity during the Dirty War, and later to determine the culprits of crimes against humanity and promote their trial and sentencing. Some 500 children are estimated to have been illegally given for adoption; 120 cases had been confirmed by DNA tests.

The term desaparecidos was used by de facto President General Jorge Rafael Videla, who said in a press conference "They are just that… desaparecidos. They are not alive, neither are they dead. They are just missing". It is thought that between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina, up to 30,000 people (8,960 named cases, according to the official report by the CONADEP) were killed and in many cases disappeared. In an originally classified cable first published by John Dinges in 2004, the Argentine 601st Intelligence Battalion, which started counting victims in 1975, in mid-1978 estimated that 22,000 persons had been killed or "disappeared".

Bangladesh
Since 2010, under the Awami League regime, at least 500 people – most of whom are opposition leaders and activists – have been declared disappeared in Bangladesh by the state security forces. According to the report of a domestic human rights organization, 82 people have disappeared from January to September 2014. After the disappearances, at least 39 of the victims were found dead while others remained missing. On 25 June 2010, an opposition leader Chowdhury Alam was arrested by the state police and remained missing since then. His abduction was later denied by the law enforcing agencies. On 17 April 2012, another prominent leader, Ilyas Ali, of the main opposition parties Bangladesh Nationalist Party disappeared by unknown armed personnel. The incident received much media coverage. Before the controversial national election of 2014, at least 19 opposition men were picked up by security forces. The incidents of enforced disappearances were condemned by both domestic and international human rights organizations. Despite the demands for the government initiatives to probe such disappearances, investigations into such cases were absent.

Belarus
In 1999 opposition leaders Yury Zacharanka and Viktar Hanchar, as well as his business associate Anatol Krasouski, disappeared. Hanchar and Krasouski disappeared the same day of a broadcast on state television in which President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the chiefs of his security services to crack down on "opposition scum". Although the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus (KGB) had had them under constant surveillance, the official investigation announced that the case could not be solved. The investigation of the disappearance of journalist Dzmitry Zavadski in 2000 has also yielded no results. Copies of a report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which linked senior Belarusian officials to the cases of disappearances, were confiscated.

In December 2019, Deutsche Welle published a documentary film in which Yury Garavski, a former member of a special unit of the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs, confirmed that it was his unit which had arrested, taken away, and murdered Zecharanka and that they later did the same with Viktar Hanchar and Anatol Krassouski.

Chile
Almost immediately after the Chilean military's seizure of power on 11 September 1973, the military junta led by the then commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet banned all the leftist parties that had constituted the democratically elected president Salvador Allende's UP coalition. All other parties were placed in "indefinite recess", and later banned outright. The regime's violence was directed not only against dissidents, but also against their families and other civilians.

The Rettig Report concluded 2,279 persons who disappeared during the military dictatorship were killed for political reasons or as a result of political violence, and approximately 31,947 were tortured according to the later Valech Report, while 1,312 were exiled. The latter were chased all over the world by the intelligence agencies. In Latin America, this was made under the auspices of Operation Condor, a combined operation between the intelligence agencies of various South American countries, assisted by a United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) communication base in Panama. Pinochet justified these operations as being necessary in order to save the country from communism.

Some political scientists have ascribed the relative bloodiness of the coup to the stability of the existing democratic system, which required extreme action to overturn. Some of the most famous cases of human rights violations occurred during the early period: in October 1973, at least 70 people were killed throughout the country by the Caravan of Death. Charles Horman, a journalist from the US, "disappeared", as did Víctor Olea Alegría, a member of the Socialist Party, and many others, in 1973. Mathematician Boris Weisfeiler is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad, a German colony founded by Nazi Christian minister Paul Schäfer in Parral, which was used as a detention center by the DINA, the secret police.

Furthermore, many other important officials of Allende's government were tracked down by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) during Operation Condor. Thus, General Carlos Prats, Pinochet's predecessor and army commander under Allende, who had resigned rather than support the moves against Allende's government, was assassinated by a car bomb in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974. A year later, the deaths of 119 opponents abroad were claimed as the product of infighting between Marxist factions, the DINA setting up a disinformation campaign to propagate this thesis, Operation Colombo. The campaign was legitimized and supported by the leading newspaper in Chile, El Mercurio.

Other prominent victims of Operation Condor included, among thousands of less famous persons, Juan José Torres, the former President of Bolivia, assassinated in Buenos Aires on 2 June 1976; Carmelo Soria, a UN diplomat working for the CEPAL, assassinated in July 1976; and Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister in Allende's cabinet, assassinated after his release from internment and exile in Washington D.C. by a car bomb on 21 September 1976. This led to strained relations with the US and to the extradition of Michael Townley, a US citizen who worked for the DINA and had organized Letelier's assassination. Other targeted victims, who survived assassination attempts, included Christian-Democrat politician Bernardo Leighton, who barely escaped an assassination attempt in Rome in 1975 by the Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie (the assassination attempt seriously injured Leighton and his wife, Anita Fresno, leaving her permanently disabled); Carlos Altamirano, the leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, targeted for murder in 1975 by Pinochet; Volodia Teitelboim, writer and member of the Communist Party; Pascal Allende, the nephew of Salvador Allende and president of the MIR, who escaped an assassination attempt in Costa Rica in March 1976; and US Congressman Edward Koch, who received death threats and was the potential assassination target by DINA and Uruguayan intelligence officers for his denunciation of Operation Condor. Furthermore, according to current investigations, Eduardo Frei Montalva, the Christian Democrat President of Chile from 1964 to 1970, may have been poisoned in 1982 by a toxin produced by DINA biochemist Eugenio Berrios. Berríos himself is reputed to having been assassinated by Chilean intelligence in Uruguay, after being spirited away to said country in the early 1990s.

Protests continued, however, during the 1980s, leading to several scandals. In March 1985, the gruesome murder of three Communist Party of Chile (PCC) members led to the resignation of César Mendoza, head of the Chilean gendarmerie the Carabineros de Chile and member of the junta since its formation. During a 1986 protest against Pinochet, 21-year-old American photographer Rodrigo Rojas DeNegri and 18-year-old student Carmen Gloria Quintana were burnt alive, killing Rojas.

In August 1989, Marcelo Barrios Andres, a 21-year-old member of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR, the armed wing of the PCC, created in 1983, which had attempted to assassinate Pinochet on 7 September 1986), was assassinated by a group of military personnel who were supposed to arrest him on orders of Valparaíso's public prosecutor. However, they simply summarily executed him; this case was included in the Rettig Report. Among the killed and disappeared during the military dictatorship were 440 MIR guerrillas.

China
On 17 May 1995 Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, along with his family, was taken into custody by the Chinese government shortly after being identified as the 11th Panchen Lama by the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. In his place, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appointed Gyaincain Norbu to act as the Panchen Lama, though Norbu is not recognized as the Panchen Lama in Tibet or elsewhere (beyond China). Nyima has not been seen in public since he was taken into custody, though the Chinese government claims that he is alive and well, but that he "does not wish to be disturbed". Enforced disappearances of human rights lawyers and defenders have increased under CCP general secretary Xi Jinping's rule since 2013. New laws grant the police unrestricted power to hold detainees secretly for indefinite periods.

Hong Kong
Lee Bo (李波) was a dual citizen of Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. On 30 December 2015 evening, Lee disappeared. His wife shortly received a phone call from him (with caller ID from Shenzhen) in which he explained in Mandarin (not Cantonese in which they would usually converse) he had to assist with some investigation for a while, and he could not be home nor provide more information for a while.

Lee was a co-owner of the Causeway Bay Books and the Might Current publishing house that specialized in selling books concerning the political gossip and other lurid subjects of the Chinese Communist Party leaders. These books were banned from mainland China but were popular among the tourists visiting Hong Kong. Towards the end of October 2015, four co-owners and managers of the bookstore and publisher, Gui Minhai, Lui Bo (呂波), Cheung Jiping (張志平), and Lam Wing-kei, went missing from Thailand and mainland China, believed to be detained by the Central Case Examination Group. Lee had expressed concern for his safety in various interviews after his colleagues disappeared and intentionally left all travel documents at home (confirmed by his wife after his disappearance).

Lee's disappearance drew wide attention. The disappearance of all five men were speculated to be connected to some upcoming news releases that would have embarrassed the Chinese Communist Party. Hong Kong citizens, under one-country two-systems, are supposedly to be protected by the Basic Law in that PRC law enforcement cannot operate in the special administrative region (SAR). Lee's disappearance was considered a threat to Article 27 and most importantly the many rights, freedom, and protection promised to Hong Kong citizens often denied in mainland China.

Colombia
In 2009, Colombian prosecutors reported that an estimated 28,000 people have disappeared due to paramilitary and guerrilla groups during the nation's ongoing internal conflict. In 2008, the corpses of 300 victims were identified and 600 more during the following year. According to Colombian officials, it will take many years before all the bodies that have been recovered are identified.

Egypt
Enforced disappearance has been employed by the Egyptian authorities under the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a key instrument to terrify, interrogate and torture opponents of El-Sisi under the guise of counter-terrorism efforts. Hundreds of people forcibly disappeared including political activists, protesters, women and children. Around three to four people are seized per day by the heavily armed security forces led by NSA officers who usually storm their homes, detain many of them, blindfold and handcuff them for months.

Between 1 August 2016 and mid-August 2017, 378 individuals have been forcibly disappeared. 291 people have been located, while the rest are still forcibly disappeared. Of the 52 children who disappeared in 2017, three were extrajudicially killed.

In 2020, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) released a five-year report on forced disappearances, revealing that the country documented 2,723 such cases since August 2015.

In March 2021, Amnesty International condemned Egyptian authorities for the forced disappearance of a husband and wife, Omar Abdelhamid Abu el-Naga and Manar Adel Abu el-Naga, along with their one-year-old child, al-Baraa, after being arrested on 9 March 2019. On 20 February 2021, the wife was questioned about having links to a terrorist group before the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP). She was detained for 15 days pending further investigations at al-Qanater women's prison, while her almost 3-year-old son was handed over to relatives. However, Omar continued to be subjected to enforced disappearance. Amnesty International urged Egypt to conduct an effective investigation into the disappearance of the family, saying, "Seizing a young mother with her one-year-old baby and confining them in a room for 23 months outside the protection of the law and with no contact with the outside world show that Egyptian authorities' ongoing campaign to stamp out dissent and instill fear has reached a new level of brutality."

El Salvador
According to the UN Working Group against Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, enforced disappearances were systematically carried out in El Salvador both prior to (starting in 1978) and during the Salvadoran Civil War. Salvadoran non-governmental organizations estimate that more than 8,000 disappearances occurred, and in the Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, it is estimated that more than 5,500 persons may have been the victims of enforced disappearance. The Office of the Procurator for the Protection of Human Rights of El Salvador claims that: "Disappearances usually took place during operations whose purpose was the detention and later the disappearance or execution of persons identified as or suspected of being government opponents, including civilians who had nothing to do with the conflict, with the apparent aim of generating terror and eliminating members of the population who might potentially become guerrillas."

Enforced disappearances of children occurred, which is thought to have been "part of a deliberate strategy within the violence institutionalized by the State during the period of conflict".

Equatorial Guinea
According to the UN Human Rights Council Mission to Equatorial Guinea, agents of the Equatorial Guinean Government have been responsible for abducting refugees from other countries in the region and holding them in secret detention. For example, in January 2010 four men were abducted from Benin by Equatorial Guinean security forces, held in secret detention, subjected to torture, and executed in August 2010 immediately after being convicted by a military court.

Germany
During World War II, Nazi Germany set up secret police forces, including branches of the Gestapo in occupied countries, to hunt down known or suspected dissidents or partisans. This tactic was given the name Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), to describe those who disappeared after being arrested by Nazi forces without any warning. The Nazis applied this policy against political opponents within Germany as well as against the resistance in occupied Europe. Most victims were killed on the spot, or sent to concentration camps, with the full expectation that they would then be killed.

Guatemala
Guatemala was one of the first countries where people were disappeared as a generalized practice of terror against a civilian population. Forced disappearances was widely practiced by the United States-backed military government of Guatemala during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War. An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 individuals were disappeared by the Guatemalan military and security forces between 1954 and 1996. The tactic of disappearance first saw widespread use in Guatemala during the mid-1960s, as government repression became widespread when the military adopted harsher counterinsurgency measures. The first documented case of forced disappearance by the government in Guatemala occurred in March 1966, when thirty Guatemalan Party of Labour associates were kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security forces; their bodies were put in sacks and dumped at sea from helicopters. This was one of the first major instances of forced disappearance in Latin American history. When law students at the University of San Carlos used legal measures (such as habeas corpus petitions) to require the government to present the detainees at court, some of the students were "disappeared" in turn.

India
Ensaaf, a nonprofit organization working to end impunity and achieve justice for mass state crimes in India, with a focus on Punjab, released a report in January 2009, in collaboration with the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), claiming "verifiable quantitative" findings on mass disappearances and extrajudicial executions in the Indian state of Punjab. It claims that in conflict-afflicted states like Punjab, Indian security forces have perpetrated gross human rights violations with impunity. The report by Ensaaf and HRDAG, "Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India", presents empirical findings suggesting that the intensification of counterinsurgency operations in Punjab in the 1980s to 1990s was accompanied by a shift in state violence from targeted lethal human rights violations to systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions, accompanied by mass "illegal cremations". Furthermore, there is key evidence suggesting security forces tortured, executed, and disappeared tens of thousands of people in Punjab from 1984 to 1995.

In 2011, the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) recommended the identification of 2,156 people buried in unmarked graves in north Kashmir. The graves were found in dozens of villages on the Indian side of the Line of Control, the border that has divided India and Pakistan since 1972. According to a report published by the commission, many of the bodies were likely to be those of civilians who disappeared more than a decade earlier in a brutal insurgency. "There is every probability that these unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves at 38 places of North Kashmir may contain the dead bodies of enforced disappearances", the report stated.

Indonesia
According to historian John Roosa, the first example of forced disappearances being used as a weapon of terror in Asia occurred during the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66.

Iraq
At least tens of thousands of people disappeared under the regime of Saddam Hussein, many of them during Operation Anfal.

On 15 December 2019, two Iraqi activists and friends – Salman Khairallah Salman and Omar al-Amri – disappeared amidst ongoing protests in Baghdad. The family and friends of the two fear the disappearance of more people following United Nations' warning to security forces and other unnamed militia groups, of carrying out a campaign of kidnapping and 'deliberate killings' in Iraq.

Iran
Following the Iran student riots in 1999, more than 70 students disappeared. In addition to an estimated 1,200–1,400 detained, the "whereabouts and condition" of five students named by Human Rights Watch remain unknown. The United Nations has also reported other disappearances. Many groups, from teacher unions to women's rights activists, have been targeted by forced disappearances. Dissident writers have been the target of disappearances, as have members of religious minorities, such as the Baháʼí Faith following the Iranian Revolution. Examples include Muhammad Movahhed and Ali Murad Davudi.

Mexico
During Mexico's Dirty War in the 1970s, thousands of suspected guerrillas, leftists, and human rights defenders disappeared, although the exact number is unclear. During the 1970s, around 470 people were disappeared in the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez alone.

According to the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH), between 2006 and 2011, 5,397 people have disappeared. Of these, 3,457 are men, 1,885 are women, but there is no information about the other 55. Usually, the forced disappearances occur in groups and are of people not related to the drug war which was started by President Felipe Calderón in 2006. The main difference from the kidnappings is that usually there is no ransom asked for the disappeared.

Over 73,000 people in Mexico have been reported as disappeared in 2020, according to the Secretaría de Gobernación of Mexico.

Morocco / Western Sahara
Several Moroccan Army personnel suspected of being implicated in the 1970s coups against King Hassan II were held in secret detention camps such as Tazmamart, where some of them died due to poor conditions or lack of medical treatment. The most famous case of forced disappearance in Morocco is that of political dissident Mehdi Ben Barka, who disappeared in obscure circumstances in France in 1965. In February 2007, Morocco signed an international convention protecting people against forced disappearance. In October 2007, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón declared the competence of the Spanish jurisdiction in the Spanish-Sahrawi disappearances between 1976 and 1987 in Western Sahara (mostly controlled by Morocco). There have been charges brought against some Moroccan military heads, some of them currently in power, such as the head of Morocco's armed forces, General Housni Benslimane, charged for the detention and disappearance campaign of Smara in 1976. Garzón's successor, Judge Pablo Ruz, reopened the case in November 2010.

Myanmar
During the ongoing Rohingya genocide, Tatmadaw forces have systematically carried out the disappearance and torture of Rohingya people.

Following the 2021 military coup and ongoing opposition movement, thousands of people have been abducted by Myanmar security forces, including politicians, election officials, journalists, activists, and protesters. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, thousands of people suspected of participation in anti-coup demonstrations have been disappeared through nighttime raids. According to UNICEF, there are over 1,000 cases of children who have been arbitrarily arrested and detained, many without access to lawyers or their families.

North Korea
In North Korea, forced disappearances of nationals are characterized by detention without contact or explanation to the families of the detained. Foreign citizens, many of whom are ethnic Koreans who were living in South Korea and Japan, have been disappeared after willfully traveling to North Korea or being abducted abroad.

Northern Ireland and Ireland
"The Disappeared" is the name given to eighteen people abducted and killed by the Provisional IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army, and other Irish Republican organizations during the Troubles.

The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains, established in 1999, is the body responsible for locating the disappeared.

In 1999, the IRA admitted to killing nine of the disappeared and gave information on the location of these bodies, but only three bodies were recovered on that occasion, one of which had already been exhumed and placed in a coffin. The best-known case was that of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of 10, widowed a few months before she disappeared, who the IRA claimed was an informer. The search for her remains was abandoned in 1999, but her body was discovered in 2003, a mile from where the IRA had indicated, by a family out on a walk. Since then seven more victims have been found—one in 2008, three in 2010,  one in 2014, two in 2015 and one in 2017. , three have yet to be located.

Pakistan
In Pakistan, the systematic practice of enforced disappearance in Pakistan originated in the era of military dictator General Pervez Musharraf. The extent of forced disappearances increased after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.Enforced disappearances constitute a significant human rights issue in Pakistan, with the reported alleged cases exceeding 7,000 according to Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances   however about 5000 of these  cases have been resolved.

Palestinian territories
In August 2015, four members of Hamas Armed wing were abducted in Sinai, Egypt. They were abducted by unidentified gunmen according to the Egyptian security officials. The abducted men were in a bus carrying fifty of the Palestinians from Rafah, to Cairo airport.

Hamas confirmed that the four abducted Palestinians were heading to Cairo. The spokesman of the interior ministry Iyad al Bazom said "We urge the Egyptian interior ministry to secure the lives of the kidnapped passengers and free them". Until the moment, no group claimed responsibility for the kidnappings.

Philippines
Estimates vary for the number of victims of enforced disappearances in the Philippines. The William S. Richardson School of Law Library at the University of Hawaii places the number of the victims of enforced disappearances under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos at 783. During the Marcos dictatorship, many people who went missing were allegedly tortured, abducted, and killed by policemen.

Charlie del Rosario was an activist and professor at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, and was last seen on the night of 19 March 1971 while putting up posters for the national congress of the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), inside the PCC Lepanto compound. The family suspected the Philippine government military in his abduction. Del Rosario, who was never seen nor heard from since, is considered the first victim of enforced disappearance during the Marcos regime.

The Southern Tagalog 10 was a group of activists working in Central Luzon during Marcos' martial law in the Philippines. These 10 university students and professors were abducted and made to disappear during martial law. Three of them were later killed and "surfaced" by suspected agents of the state. The rest remain missing to this day.

Romania
During the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, it is claimed that forced disappearances occurred. For example, during the strikes of 1977 and 1987 in Romania, leading persons involved in the strikes are alleged to have been "disappeared".

Russia
Russian rights groups estimate there have been about 5,000 forced disappearances in Chechnya since 1999. Most of them are believed to be buried in several dozen mass graves.

The Russian government failed to pursue any accountability process for human rights abuses committed during the course of the conflict in Chechnya. Unable to secure justice domestically, hundreds of victims of abuse have filed applications with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In March 2005 the court issued the first rulings on Chechnya, finding the Russian government guilty of violating the right to life and the prohibition of torture with respect to civilians who had died or been forcibly disappeared at the hands of Russia's federal troops.

Since the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, Amnesty International has documented several enforced disappearances of ethnic Crimean Tatars, none of which has been effectively investigated. On 24 May 2014 Ervin Ibragimov, a former member of the Bakhchysarai Town Council and a member of the World Congress of Crimean Tatars went missing. CCTV footage from a camera at a nearby shop captured a group of men stopping Ibragimov, speaking with him briefly before forcing him into their van. According to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Russian authorities refused to investigate the disappearance of Ibragimov.

South Korea

Forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings were openly used by the First Republic of Korea during the Jeju uprising, during the Korea War, and as part of the Bodo league massacre during the Korean war. A taboo to speak about these incidents lasted until the end of authoritarian rule in South Korea in 1993.

During the persecution of alleged leftist sympathizers during the war, ordinary civilians under suspicion were rounded up and grouped into four groups A, B, C and D. Groups C and D were shot immediately and buried in unmarked mass graves. A and B were drafted and/or sent on to death marches or held in Bodo League reeducation facilities.

Survivors and family members of extrajudicially killed and disappeared or re-educated persons faced death and forced disappearance if they talked about these incidences during the period of authoritarian rule.

Many of the forced disappearances and accidentally discovered mass graves during authoritarian rule were falsely blamed on North Koreans or the People's Liberation Army of China. South Korea is currently involved in shedding light on some of these incidences using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Some of the forced disappearance victims include high-profile politicians such as late South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kim Dae-jung, who was forcefully disappeared from his Tokyo hotel room. His attempted murder by throwing him with weights on his legs overboard into the open sea was coordinated by the National Intelligence Service and the Toa-kai yakuza syndicate.

Spain

The United Nations working group for Human Rights reported in 2013 that during the period between the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975), an estimated 114,226 people "disappeared" by being forcibly taken away by either official or unofficial armed groups, where they were secretly murdered and later buried in undisclosed locations. The report also mentions the systematic kidnapping and "stealing" of approximately 30,960 children and newborns, which continued even after the end of the dictatorship during the 1970s and 1980s.

The disappearances include whole Republican military units, such as the 221st Mixed Brigade. The families of the deceased soldiers speculate that the bodies of the disappeared members of this unit may have ended up in unknown mass graves.

It was not until 2008 that the first attempt was made to take the issue to court, with that attempt failing and with the judge in charge of the process, Baltasar Garzón, being himself impeached and subsequently disqualified. The UN's Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has openly stated that the Spanish Government is failing to its duties in these matters. the Spanish authorities keep actively hampering the investigation into forced disappearances that took place during and after the civil war.

Estimate of the Desaparecidos del franquismo
Identification and systematic analysis of the bones of victims in mass graves have not yet, to date, been undertaken by any government of the current Spanish democracy (since 1977).

According to La Nueva España newspaper, the data of people buried in mass graves brought before the Audiencia Nacional court on 16 October 2008 are the following:

 * Andalusia: 32,289 (Almería: 373, Cádiz: 1,665, Córdoba: 7,091, Granada: 5,048, Huelva: 3,805, Jaén: 3,253, Málaga: 7,797, Sevilla: 3,257)
 * Aragón: 10,178 (Huesca: 2,061, Teruel: 1,338, Zaragoza: 6,779)
 * Asturias: 1,246 (Gijón: 1,246)
 * Balearic Islands: 1,777 (Mallorca: 1,486, Menorca: 106, Eivissa and Formentera: 185)
 * Canary Islands: 262 (Gran Canaria: 200, Tenerife: 62)
 * Cantabria: 850
 * Castilla-La Mancha: 7,067 (Albacete: 1,026, Ciudad Real: 1,694, Cuenca: 377, Toledo: 3,970)
 * Castilla-León: 12,979 (Ávila: 650, Burgos: 4,800, León: 1,250, Palencia: 1,180, Salamanca: 650, Segovia: 370, Soria: 287, Valladolid: 2,555, Zamora: 1,237)
 * Catalonia: 2,400
 * Valencian Community: 4,345 (Aicante: 742, Castellón: 1,303, Valencia: 2,300)
 * Basque Country: 9,459 (Álava: 100, Guipúzcoa: 340, Vizcaya: 369)
 * Basque Government data: 8,650
 * Extremadura: 10,266
 * Galicia: 4,396
 * La Rioja: 2,007
 * Madrid: 2,995
 * Murcia: 855
 * Navarra: 3,431
 * Ceuta, Melilla and North African territories: 464
 * Other territories: 7,000
 * Total: 114,266
 * The final total number was corrected and expanded during the course of the trials, reaching a total of 143,353

Sri Lanka
Since 1980, 12,000 Sri Lankans have gone missing after being detained by security forces. More than 55,000 people have been killed in the past 27 years. The figures are still lower than the then-current Sri Lankan government's 2009 estimate of 17,000 people missing, which was made after it came to power with a commitment to correct the human rights issues.

In 2003, the International Red Cross (ICRC) restarted investigations into the disappearance of 11,000 people during Sri Lanka's civil war.

On 29 May 2009, the British newspaper The Times acquired confidential U.N. documents that record nearly 7,000 civilian deaths in the no-fire zone up to the end of April. The toll then surged, the paper quoted unidentified U.N. sources as saying, with an average of 1,000 civilians killed each day until 19 May, when the government declared victory over the Tamil Tiger rebels. That means the final death toll is more than 20,000, The Times said. "Higher", a U.N. source told the paper. "Keep going." The United Nations has previously said 7,000 civilians were killed in fighting between January and May. A top Sri Lankan official called the 20,000-figure unfounded. Gordon Weiss, a U.N. spokesman in Sri Lanka, told CNN that a large number of civilians were killed, though he did not confirm the 20,000 figure.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accused Sri Lanka of "causing untold suffering".

Syria
According to Human Rights Watch, no fewer than 17,000 people disappeared during Hafez al-Assad's 30-year rule.

Bashar al-Assad took his father's policy further and considered any voice questioning anything about Syria's political, economic, social, or otherwise policies should be monitored and when needed, detained and accused of weakening national empathy. A recent case is Tal Mallohi, a 19-year-old blogger summoned for interrogation on 27 December 2009, who was released over 4 years later.

In November 2015, Amnesty International released a report accusing the Syrian government and its allied militants of kidnapping tens of thousands of people since 2011. The international organization said that such acts represent a crime against humanity. The organization called Syrian government to allow the entry of the UN's international committee of inquiry observers in order to access information related to the detainees. Amnesty International has claimed that more than 65,000 people, mostly civilians, have been forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2015. The Syrian government, on the other hand, has repeatedly denied reports accusing it of committing crimes against humanity.

Thailand
In 2013, the Bangkok Post reported that Police General Vasit Dejkunjorn, founder of the Thai Spring movement, told a seminar that forced disappearance is a tool which corrupt state power uses to eliminate individuals deemed a threat.

According to Amnesty Thailand, at least 59 human-rights defenders have been victims of forced disappearance between 1998 and 2018. Attorney Somchai Neelapaijit, Karen activist Pholachi "Billy" Rakchongcharoen, and activist Den Khamlae are among those who disappeared.

Haji Sulong, a reformist and a separatist disappeared in 1954. He sought for greater recognition of the Jawi community in Patani and Tanong Po-arn. The Thai labour union leader who disappeared following the 1991 Thai coup d'état by National Peace Keeping Council against the elected government.

On 12 March 2004, Somchai Neelapaijit, a well-known Thai Muslim activist lawyer in the kingdom's southern region, was kidnapped by Thai police and has since disappeared. Officially listed as a disappeared person, his presumed widow, Ankhana Neelapaichit, has been seeking justice for her husband since Somchai went missing. On 11 March 2009, Mrs Neelapaichit was part of a special panel at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand to commemorate her husband's disappearance and to keep attention focused on the case and on human rights abuses in Thailand.

According to the legal assistance group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, at least 86 Thais left Thailand seeking asylum abroad following the military takeover in May 2014. Among them are the four members of the Thai band Fai Yen, some of whose songs mock the monarchy, a serious offense in Thailand. The band announced on social media that its members feared for their lives after "many trusted people told us that the Thai military will come to kill us." All of those who disappeared in late-2018 and early-2019 were accused by Thai authorities of anti-monarchical activity.

Two Thai activists went missing while living in exile in Vientiane, Laos: Itthipol Sukpaen, who vanished in June 2016; and Wuthipong "Ko Tee" Kochathamakun, who disappeared from his residence in July 2017. Eyewitnesses said Wuthipong was abducted by a group of Thai-speaking men dressed in black.

In December 2018, Surachai Danwattananusorn, a Thai political exile, and two aides went missing from their home in Vientiane, Laos. The two aides were later found murdered. Some in the Thai media see the forced disappearances and murders as a warning to anti-monarchists. , Surachai remains missing. The number of "disappeared" Thai activists exiled in Laos may be as high as five since 2015.

Siam Theerawut, Chucheep Chivasut, and Kritsana Thapthai, three Thai anti-monarchy activists, went missing on 8 May 2019, when they are thought to have been extradited to Thailand from Vietnam after they attempted to enter the country with counterfeit Indonesian passports. The trio are wanted in Thailand for insulting the monarchy and failing to report when summoned by the junta after the 2014 Thai coup d'état. Their disappearance passed the one year mark on 8 May 2020 with still no sign of the trio.

Thai pro-democracy activist Wanchalearn Satsaksit was abducted from Phnom Penh, Cambodia on 4 June 2020, which prompted public concern and became a factor behind the 2020 Thai protests.

Turkey
Turkish human rights groups accuse the Turkish security forces of being responsible for the disappearance of more than 1,500 Kurdish minority civilians the 1980s and 1990s, in attempts to root out the PKK. Every week on Saturdays since 1995, Saturday Mothers hold silent vigils and sit-in protests to demand that their lost ones to be found and those responsible be brought to justice. Each year Yakay-Der, the Turkish Human Rights Association (İHD) and the International Committee Against Disappearances (ICAD), organise a series of events in Turkey to mark the "Week of Disappeared People".

In April 2009, state prosecutors in Turkey ordered the excavation of several sites around Turkey believed to hold Kurdish victims of state death squads from the 1980s and 1990s, in response to calls for Turkey's security establishment to come clean about past abuses.

In a study published in June 2017 by Sweden-based Stockholm Center for Freedom, 12 individual cases of enforced disappearances in Turkey since 2016 were documented under the emergency rule. The research titled as "Enforced Disappearances in Turkey" claimed that all cases were connected to clandestine elements within Turkish security forces. Turkish authorities were reluctant to investigate the cases despite pleas from family members.

Ukraine
During the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, there have been many cases of forced disappearances in the territory of the disputed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR). DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that his forces detained up to five "Ukrainian subversives" each day. It was estimated that about 632 people were under illegal detention by separatist forces on 11 December 2014.

On 2 June 2017 freelance journalist Stanislav Aseyev was abducted. The de facto DPR government first denied knowing his whereabouts, but on 16 July, an agent of the DPR's Ministry of State Security confirmed that Aseyev was in their custody and that he is suspected of espionage. Independent media is not allowed to report from DPR-controlled territory.

United States
According to Amnesty International (AI), the United States has engaged in forced disappearance of prisoners of war, all captured overseas and never taken to the US, in the course of its War on Terror. AI lists at "least 39 detainees, all of whom are still missing, who are believed to have been held in secret sites run by the United States government overseas."

The United States Department of Defense kept the identity of the individuals it held in the US Guantanamo Bay Naval Base ("Gitmo") in Cuba secret, from its opening on 11 January 2002 to 20 April 2006. An official list of the 558 individuals then held in the camp was published on 20 April 2006 in response to a court order from United States District Judge Jed Rakoff. Another list, stated to be of all 759 individuals who had been held in Guantanamo, was published on 20 May 2006.

In 2015, American journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote a series of articles in The Guardian on the Homan Square facility in Chicago, comparing it to a CIA black site. Ackerman asserted that the facility was the "scene of secretive work by special police units," where the "basic constitutional rights" of "poor, black and brown" Chicago city residents were violated. Ackerman asserted that "Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside."

Venezuela
A report produced by Foro Penal and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights documents that 200 cases of forced disappearances in 2018 increased to 524 in 2019, attributed to increased protests. The analysis found that the average disappearance lasted just over five days, suggesting the government sought to avoid the scrutiny that might accompany large-scale and long-term detentions.

Former Yugoslavia
Thousands of people were subject to forced disappearance during the Yugoslav Wars.

Enforced disappearances within migration
The increasingly perilous journeys of migrants and refugees and the ever more rigid migration policies of states and transnational organizations like the European Union cause a particular risk for migrants to become victims of enforced disappearances. This has been recognized by the UN's Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Also the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances recognized the increased risk of enforced disappearances as a result of migration in the Guiding Principles for the Search of Disappeared Persons.

title: Enforced disappearance


text:
List of aircraft losses of the Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War, thousands of U.S. aircraft were lost to antiaircraft artillery (AAA), surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and fighter interceptors (MiG)s. The great majority of U.S. combat losses in all areas of Southeast Asia were to AAA. The Royal Australian Air Force also flew combat and airlift missions in South Vietnam, as did the South Vietnamese Republic of Vietnam Air Force (RVNAF). Among fixed-wing aircraft, more F-4 Phantoms were lost than any other type in service with any nation.

The United States lost 578 Firebee Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (554 over Vietnam and 24 over China). More than 400 QH-50C/D UAVs were also lost.

There were about 11,846 U.S helicopters that served in the Vietnam War. The U.S records show 5,607 helicopter losses.

In total, the United States military lost in Vietnam almost 10,000 aircraft, helicopters and UAVs (3,744 planes, 5,607 helicopters and about 1,000 UAVs. ).

South Vietnam lost 1,018 aircraft and helicopters from January 1964 to September 1973. 877 Republic of Vietnam aircraft were captured at war's end (1975) Of the 2750 aircraft and helicopters received by South Vietnam, only about 308 survived (240 flew to Thailand or US warships and 68 returned to the United States ).

The United States, South Vietnam and Australia, lost about 12,500 aircraft, helicopters and UAVs.

North Vietnam lost 150 – 170 aircraft and helicopters.

United States Air Force
All told, the U.S. Air Force flew 5.25 million sorties over South Vietnam, North Vietnam, northern and southern Laos, and Cambodia, losing 2,251 aircraft: 1,737 to hostile action, and 514 in accidents. 2,197 of the losses were fixed-wing, and the remainder rotary-wing. The USAF sustained approximately 0.4 losses per 1,000 sorties during the conflict, which compared favorably with a 2.0 rate in Korea and a 9.7 figure during World War II.

USAF fixed-wing

 * A-1 Skyraider—191 total, 150 in combat
 * First loss: A-1E 52-132465 (1st Air Commando Squadron [ACS], 34th Tactical Group [TG]) shot down during night training mission on 29 August 1964 near Bien Hoa, SVN (Capt Richard Dean Goss KIA, one RVNAF observer [name unknown] KIA)
 * Final loss: A-1H 52-139738 (1st Special Operations Squadron, 56th Special Operations Wing) which was shot down 28 September 1972 (pilot was rescued by an Air America helicopter)
 * A-7D Corsair II six total, four in combat
 * First loss: 71–0310 (355th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 354th TFW) on 2 December 1972 shot down on a CSAR mission in Laos (Capt Anthony Shine KIA)
 * Final loss: 70–0945 (354th TFW) shot down in Cambodia on 25 May 1973 (Capt Jeremiah Costello KIA)
 * A-26 Invader—22 total
 * First loss: B-26B 44-35530 (Detachment 2A, 1st ACG) shot down in IV CTZ on the night of 4–5 November 1962, killing the three crew
 * Final loss: A-26A 64-17646 (609th SOS, 56th SOW) lost over Laos on the night of 7–8 July 1969, killing both crewmen
 * A-37 Dragonfly—22 total
 * First loss: 1967, final loss: 1972

 * AC-47 Spooky—19 total, 12 in combat
 * First loss: 1965, final loss: 1969
 * AC-119 Shadow/Stinger—six total, two in combat
 * First loss: AC-119G 52-5907 (Det.1, 17th SOS, 14th SOW) which crashed on take-off from Tan Son Nhut, SVN, on 11 October 1969, killing six of 10 crewmen
 * Final loss: AC-119K 53-7826 (18th SOS, 56th SOW out of Bien Hoa AB), shot down by 37mm flak over An Lộc, SVN, on 2 May 1972, seven survivors of 10 crewmen
 * AC-130 Spectre—six total, all in combat
 * First loss: AC-130A 54-1629 (16th SOS, 8th TFW) hit by 37mm anti-aircraft gun over Laos and crash-landed at Ubon RTAFB, two crewmen died (one died of injuries before reaching Ubon) but 11 others survived
 * Final loss: 1972
 * B-52 Stratofortress—31 total (17 in combat, two more being scrapped after sustaining battle damage, and 12 crashed in flight accidents)
 * First losses were operational (non-combat) mid-air collision two B-52F 57-0047 and 57-0179 (441st Bomb Squadron, 320th Bomb Wing), 18 June 1965, South China Sea during air refueling orbit, eight of 12 crewmen killed
 * Final loss: B-52D 55-0056 (307th Bomb Wing Provisional) to SAM 4 January 1973, crew rescued from Gulf of Tonkin
 * B-57 Canberra—56 total, 38 in combat
 * First loss: 1964, final loss: 1970
 * C-5A Galaxy—one total, 0 in combat
 * Crashed while attempting emergency landing at Tan Son Nhut AB 4 April 1975, as part of Operation Babylift.
 * C-7 Caribou—19 total, 9 in combat
 * First loss: C-7B 62-4161 (459th Tactical Airlift Squadron, 483d Tactical Airlift Wing) which was hit by a US 155mm shell on 3 August 1967 in SVN killing the three crewmen. Note: there were two fatal crashes during Operation Red Leaf transition training of USAF crews in Army CV-2's, on 4 and 28 October 1966.
 * Final loss: C-7B 62-12584 (483d TAW) which crashed in SVN on 13 January 1971, all four crewmen survived.
 * C-47 Skytrain—21 total
 * A C-47 was the very first USAF aircraft lost in the SEA conflict, C-47B 44-76330 (315th Air Division) on TDY at Vientiane, Laos which was shot down by the Pathet Lao on 23 March 1961 killing seven of the eight crewmen. The sole survivor, US Army Maj. Lawrence Bailey was captured and held until August 1962.
 * Final loss: EC-47Q 43-48636 (361st Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron, 56th SOW) shot down in Laos on the night of 04/5 4–5 February 1973, killing all eight crewmen.
 * C-123 Provider—53 total, 21 in combat
 * First loss: C-123B 56-4370 attached to the 464th TAW which came down on an Operation Ranch Hand (defoliation) training flight between Bien Hoa and Vung Tau, SVN on 2 February 1962
 * Final loss: 1971
 * C-130 Hercules—55 total, 34 in combat
 * First loss: C-130A 57-0475 (817th Troop Carrier Squadron, 6315th Operations Group) on 24 April 1965, a Blind Bat flareship that crashed into high ground near Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, attempting to land in bad weather with a heavy load, two engine failures, and low fuel, killing all six crewmen. This was the 14th recorded loss of a C-130 to all causes.
 * Final loss: C-130E 72-1297 (314th TAW) destroyed by rocket fire at Tan Son Nhut AB on 28 April 1975.
 * C-141 Starlifter—2 total, 0 in combat
 * First loss: C-141A 65-9407 (62d Military Airlift Wing) destroyed in a night runway collision with a USMC A-6 at Danang, SVN on 23 March 1967 killing 5 of the 6 crewmen.
 * Final loss: C-141A 66-0127 (4th Military Airlift Squadron, 62d MAW) crashed soon after take-off from Cam Ranh Bay, SVN on 13 April 1967 killing 6 of the 8-man crew.
 * E/RB-66 Destroyer—14 total
 * First loss: RB-66B 53-0452 (Det 1, 41st Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, 6250th Combat Support Group) which crashed 22–23 October 1965 west of Pleiku, SVN killing the crew.
 * Final loss: EB-66B 42nd TEWS, 388th TFS lost to engine failure on 23 December 1972 during Operation Linebacker II. 3 crewmen were KIA.
 * EC-121 BatCat—2 total, 0 combat
 * First loss: EC-121R 67-24193 (554th Reconnaissance Squadron, 553d RW) crashed 25 April 1969 on take-off in a thunderstorm from Korat RTAFB, killing all 18 crewmen.
 * Final loss: EC-121R 67-21495 (554th RS) crashed on approach to Korat RTAFB on 6 September 1969, 4 of the 16 men were killed.
 * F-4 Phantom II—445 total, 382 in combat
 * First loss: operational (non-combat), F-4C 64-0674 (45TH TFS, 15th TFW) which ran out of fuel after strike in SVN on 9 June 1965; first combat loss F-4C 64-0685 (45th TFS, 15th TFW) shot down Ta Chan, NW NVN on 20 June 1965. 9 of the losses were parked aircraft struck by rockets.
 * Final loss: F-4D 66-8747 (432d TRW) on 29 June 1973.
 * F-5 Freedom Fighter—9 total
 * First loss: 1965, final loss: 1967
 * F-100 Super Sabre—243 total, 198 in combat
 * First loss: 1964, final loss: 1971
 * F-102 Delta Dagger—14 total, 7 in combat
 * First loss: 1964, final loss: 1967. 4 of the combat losses were parked aircraft.
 * F-104 Starfighter—14 total, 9 in combat
 * First loss: 56–0937 (476th TFS, 497th TFW) shot down by enemy ground fire during CAS mission near Tri Dao, Vietnam, on 29 June 1965, pilot Capt. R. Cole rescued
 * Final loss: 57-0922 (435th TFS, 8th TFW) operational loss due to engine failure on 14 May 1967 in Thailand, pilot name unknown, survived

 * F-105D Thunderchief—335 total, 283 in combat
 * First loss: 62–4371 (36th TFS, 6441st TFW) written off from battle damage over Laos 14 August 1964, at Korat, Thailand
 * Final loss: 61–0153 (44th TFS, 355th TFW) shot down Laos 23 September 1970, pilot Capt. J. W. Newhouse rescued
 * F-105F/G Thunderchief—47 total, 37 combat
 * First loss: EF-105F 63-8286 (13th TFS, 388th TFW) shot down by AAA RP-6 July 1966, Maj. Roosevelt Hestle and Capt. Charles Morgan KIA
 * Final loss: F-105G 63-8359 (Det.1 561st TFS, 388th TFW) shot down by SAM 16 November 1972, RP-3, crew rescued
 * F-111A Aardvark—11 total, 6 in combat
 * First loss: mission-related TFR failure, 66-0022 (428th TFS 474th TFW, Project Combat Lancer), 28 March 1968, Maj. H.E. Mccann and Capt. D.L. Graham MIA
 * Final loss: 67–0111 (474th TFW) mid-air collision over Cambodia, 16 June 1973, both crewmen rescued
 * HU-16 Albatross—4 total, 2 in combat
 * First loss: 51–5287 to unknown cause 19 June 1965
 * 51–0058 to unknown cause, 3 July 1965
 * 51-0071 (33d ARRS) shot down by AAA 14 March 1966, two crewmen killed
 * Final loss: 51-7145 (37th ARRS) disappeared 18 October 1966, 7 crewmen KIA-BNR
 * KB-50 Superfortress tanker—1 total, 0 combat
 * Only loss: KB-50J 48-0065 (421st Air Refueling Squadron Detachment) at Takhli RTAFB which crashed in Thailand on 14 October 1964, all 6 crewmen survived
 * KC-135 Stratotanker—3 total, 0 combat
 * Two crashes in 1968, one 1969, all operational (non-combat)
 * O-1 Bird Dog—172 total, 122 in combat
 * First loss: 1963
 * Final loss: 1972
 * O-2 Skymaster—104 total, 82 in combat
 * First loss: 1967
 * Final loss: 1972
 * OV-10 Bronco—63 total, 47 in combat
 * First loss: 1968
 * Final loss: 1973
 * QU-22 Pave Eagle—8 lost, 7 in combat
 * First loss: YQU-22A 68-10531 (554th RS, 553d RW) crashed due to engine failure on 11 June 1969
 * Final loss: QU-22B 70-1546 (554th RS) on 25 August 1972, pilot killed
 * RF-4C Phantom II—83 total, 76 in combat
 * First loss: 1966
 * Final loss: 1972

 * RF-101 Voodoo—39 total, 33 in combat
 * First loss: 1964
 * Final loss: 1968
 * SR-71A Blackbird—2 total, 0 combat
 * First loss: 64-17969 (Det OL-8, 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing) suffered engine failure over Thailand on 10 May 1970, both crewmen ejected safely
 * Final loss: 64-17978 (Det OL-KA, 9th SRW) crashed on landing at Kadena, Okinawa on 20 July 1972, both crewmen survived
 * T-28 Trojan—23 total
 * First loss: 1962
 * Final loss: 1968
 * U-2C "Dragon Lady"—1 total, 0 combat
 * Only loss: 56–6690 (349th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron 100th SRW) which crashed on 8 October 1966 near Bien Hoa, SVN, Maj. Leo J Stewart ejected and was rescued
 * U-3B Blue Canoe—1 total, 1 in combat
 * Only loss: 60–6058, destroyed on the ground during a VC attack on Tan Son Nhut, SVN on 14 June 1968.
 * U-6A Beaver—1 total, 0 in combat
 * Only loss: 51-15565 (432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing) which crashed in Thailand 28 December 1966, both crewmen survived
 * U-10D Courier—1 total, 1 in combat
 * Only loss: 63-13102 (5th SOS, 14th SOW) shot down 14 August 1969 near Bien Hoa, killing 1/Lt Roger Brown

USAF rotary-wing

 * CH/HH-3 Jolly Green Giant—34 total, 25 in combat
 * First loss: CH-3E 63-9685 (38th ARRS) to AAA North Vietnam on 6 November 1965, three crewmen POW, one rescued
 * Final loss: HH-3E 65-12785 (37th ARRS) 21 November 1970, combat-assaulted inside Son Tay POW camp (Operation Ivory Coast) and deliberately destroyed by U.S. Special Forces
 * HH-43B Pedro—13 lost, 8 in combat
 * First loss: 63–9713 (38th ARRS) damaged by fire 2 June 1965, crew rescued and aircraft destroyed to prevent its capture
 * Final loss: 60–0282 (38th ARRS) crashed Cam Ranh Bay 7 August 1969, crew rescued
 * CH/HH-53 Super Jolly—27 total, 17 in combat
 * First loss: HH-53C 66-14430 (40th ARRS) in Laos, damaged by gunfire 18 January 1969 crew rescued and aircraft destroyed by bombing to prevent capture
 * Last losses: four CH-53s (68-10925, −10926, −10927, 70–1627, all from 21st SOS, 56th SOW) to AAA on 15 May 1975, Koh Tang, Kampuchea, (Mayaguez incident final aircraft losses of Vietnam War)
 * UH-1 Iroquois—36 total

United States Navy
Twenty-one aircraft carriers conducted 86 war cruises and operated 9,178 total days on the line in the Gulf of Tonkin. 532 aircraft were lost in combat and 329 more to operational causes, resulting in the deaths of 401 naval aviators, with 64 airmen reported missing and 179 taken prisoner of war.

USN fixed-wing carrier-based

 * A-1 Skyraider—65 total, 48 in combat
 * First loss: A-1H 139760 (VA-145, USS Constellation (CV-64)), to AAA 5 August 1964, Lt.j.g. R. C. Sather KIA (body recovered in 1985)
 * Final loss: A-1H 134499 (VA-25, USS Coral Sea (CV-43)), to MiG 15 February 1968, Lt.j.g. J.P. Dunn KIA
 * A-3 Skywarrior—7 total, 2 in combat
 * First loss: A-3B 142250 (VAH-4, USS Hancock (CV-19)), operational loss (non-combat) 22 December 1964, 3 rescued, 1 killed
 * Final loss: A-3B 144627 (VAH-4, USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63)), AAA 8 March 1967, 3 crewmen KIA

 * A-4 Skyhawk—282 total, 195 in combat
 * First loss: A-4C 149578 (VA-144, USS Constellation), AAA 5 August 1964, Lt.j.g. Everett Alvarez POW (second longest held prisoner)
 * Final loss: A-4F 155021 (VA-212, USS Hancock (CV-19)), AAA 6 September 1972, pilot rescued
 * A-6 Intruder—62 total, 51 in combat
 * First loss: A-6A 151584 (VA-75, USS Independence (CV-62)), own bomb detonation Laos 14 July 1965, crew rescued
 * Final loss: A-6A 157007 (VA-35, USS America (CV-66)), AAA South Vietnam 24 January 1973, crew rescued
 * A-7 Corsair—100 total, 55 in combat
 * First loss: A-7A 153239 (VA-147, USS Ranger (CV-61)), SAM North Vietnam 22 December 1967, LCdr J.M. Hickerson POW
 * Final loss: A-7E 156837 (VA-147, USS Constellation), operational loss (non-combat) 29 January 1973, pilot missing
 * Operation Frequent Wind loss—"The Enterprise flew 95 sorties in support of the operation, but on no occasion was any ordnance used in anger, although an A-7E was lost to undetermined causes". The pilot was rescued at sea.
 * C-1 Trader—4 total, 0 in combat
 * First loss: C-1A 146047 (VR-21, USS Independence), non-combat 30 August 1965, 7 passengers and crew rescued
 * C-1A 136784 (VR-21, USS Independence), operational loss (non-combat) 12 September 1965, 9 passengers and crew rescued, 1 killed
 * C-1A 146016 (Composite Squadron Five VC-5), operational loss (non-combat) 8 August 1967, 3 passengers and 2 crew rescued
 * Final loss: C-1A 146054 (Carrier Air Wing 11, USS Kitty Hawk), operational loss (non-combat) 16 January 1968, 7 passengers and crew rescued, 3 killed
 * C-2 Greyhound—2 total, 0 in combat
 * First loss: C-2A 152796 (VRC-50, USS Constellation), Gulf of Tonkin crash 2 October 1969, 26 passengers and crew killed
 * Final loss: C-2A 152793 (VRC-50, USS Ranger), Gulf of Tonkin crash 15 December 1970, 3 crew killed
 * E-1 Tracer—3 total, 0 in combat
 * First loss: E-1B 148918 (VAW-12, USS Independence), operational loss (non-combat) 22 September 1965, crew rescued
 * Final loss: E-1B 148132 (VAW-111, USS Oriskany (CV-34)), operational loss (non-combat) 8 October 1967, 5 crewmen killed
 * E-2 Hawkeye—2 total, 0 in combat
 * First loss: E-2A 151711 (VAW-116, USS Coral Sea), 8 April 1970, 5 crewmen killed
 * Final loss: E-2B 151719 (VAW-115, USS Midway (CV-41)), 11 June 1971, 5 crewmen missing
 * EKA-3 Skywarrior—2 lost, 0 in combat
 * First loss: EKA-3B 142400 (VAQ-132, USS America), operational loss (non-combat) 4 July 1970, 3 rescued
 * Final loss: EKA-3B 142634 (VAQ-130, USS Ranger), operational loss (non-combat) 21 January 1973, 3 crewmen killed
 * EA-1 Skyraider—4 total, 1 in combat
 * First loss: EA-1E 139603 (VAW-111, USS Yorktown (CV-10)), operational loss (non-combat) 15 April 1965, crew rescued
 * Final loss: EA-1F 132543 (VAW-13, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42)), operational loss (non-combat) 10 September 1966, crew rescued
 * F-4 Phantom—138 total, 75 in combat
 * First loss: F-4B 151412 (VA-142, USS Constellation), operational loss (non-combat) 13 November 1964, crew rescued
 * Final combat loss (also last USN combat loss of war): F-4J 155768 (VF-143, USS Enterprise (CVN-65)), AAA South Vietnam 27 January 1973, Cdr H.H. Hall (MIA) and LCdr P.A. Kientzler (POW)
 * Final loss: F-4J 158361 (VF-21, USS Ranger), operational loss (non-combat) 29 January 1973, crew killed
 * F-8 Crusader—118 total, 57 in combat
 * First loss: F-8D (VF-111, USS Kitty Hawk), to AAA over Laos 7 June 1964, LCdr C.D. Lynn rescued
 * Final loss: (operational) F-8J 150887 (VF-191, USS Oriskany) 26 November 1972, pilot rescued
 * KA-3 Skywarrior—2 lost, 0 in combat
 * First loss: KA-3B 142658 (VAH-4, USS Oriskany), operational loss (non-combat) 28 July 1967, 1 crewmen rescued, 2 killed
 * Final loss: KA-3B 138943 (VAH-10, USS Coral Sea), operational loss (non-combat) 17 February 1969, 3 crewmen killed

 * RA-5 Vigilante—27 total, 18 in combat
 * First loss: RA-5C 149306 (RVAH-5, USS Ranger), operational loss (non-combat) 9 December 1965, 2 crewmen killed
 * Final loss: RA-5C 156633 (RVAH-13, USS Enterprise), to MiG-21 North Vietnam 28 December 1972, Lcdr A.H. Agnew POW, Lt. M.F. Haifley KIA
 * RF-8 Crusader—29 total, 19 in combat
 * First loss: RF-8A (Det. C VFP-63, USS Kitty Hawk), 6 June 1964, to AAA in Laos, Lt. C. F. Klusmann POW
 * Final loss: RF-8G 144608 (VFP-63, USS Oriskany), operational loss (non-combat) 13 December 1972, pilot rescued
 * S-2 Tracker—5 total, 3 in combat
 * First loss: S-2D 149252 (VS-35, USS Hornet (CV-12)), unknown combat loss 21 January 1966, 4 crewmen missing
 * Final loss: S-2E (VS-23, USS Yorktown), unknown combat loss 17 March 1968, 4 crewmen KIA

USN rotary-wing

 * SH-2/UH-2 Sea Sprite—12 lost, 0 in combat
 * First loss: UH-2A 149751 (HC-1, USS Hancock), operational loss (non-combat) 10 January 1966, 4 crewmen rescued
 * Final loss: UH-2C 149767 (HC-1, USS Bon Homme Richard (CV-31)), operational loss (non-combat) 10 August 1969, 4 crewmen rescued
 * SH-3 Sea King—20 lost, 8 in combat
 * First loss: SH-3A 148993 (HS-2, USS Hornet), AAA North Vietnam 13 November 1965, 4 crewmen rescued
 * Final loss: SH-3D 156494 (HS-7, USS Saratoga (CV-60)), operational loss (non-combat) 31 December 1972, crew rescued

USN fixed-wing land-based

 * OV-10 Bronco—7 total, 6 in combat
 * First VAL-4 loss: 155490 was shot down the night of 12 July 1969. Crash Location: Near Ap Bac, Chau Doc Province, South Vietnam. Both Aircrew members were Killed In-Action
 * Last VAL-4 loss: 155461 crashed on 9 February 1972. Crash Location: Into Sea off southwest coast of Vietnam near Rach Gia and Ca Mau. Pilot was Killed In-Action, Copilot ejected and was Wounded In-Action
 * P-3B Orion – 2 lost
 * First loss: P3-B 153440 (VP-26, U-Tapao), AAA South Vietnam, 6 February 1968, 12 crewmen KIA
 * Final loss: P3-B 153445 (VP-26, U-Tapao), possible AAA South Vietnam, 1 April 1968, 12 crewmen KIA

United States Marine Corps
U.S. Marine Corps aircraft lost in combat included 193 fixed-wing and 270 rotary-wing aircraft.

USMC fixed-wing

 * A-4 Skyhawk—81 lost
 * A-6 Intruder—25 lost+
 * C-117 Skytrain—2 lost
 * EA-6A Intruder—2 lost
 * EF-10 Skynight—5 lost
 * F-4 Phantom—95 lost, 72 combat
 * F-8 Crusader—21 lost
 * KC-130 Hercules—4 lost
 * O-1 Bird Dog—7 lost
 * OV-10 Bronco—10 lost
 * RF-4 Phantom—4 lost
 * RF-8 Crusader—1 lost
 * TA-4 Skyhawk—10 lost
 * TF-9 Cougar—1 lost

USMC rotary-wing

 * AH-1 Cobra—7 lost
 * HUS-1—75 lost
 * UH-1E Huey—69 lost
 * CH-37 Mojave—1 lost
 * CH-46D Sea Knight—109 lost
 * CH-53 Sea Stallion—9 lost

USA fixed-wing

 * OV-1A/B/C/D Mohawk—65 lost
 * O-1 Bird Dog—297 lost

USA rotary-wing
5,195+
 * Bell 205—1 lost (Air America)
 * AH-1G—303 lost+
 * CH-21C—14 lost
 * CH-34—2 lost
 * CH-37B—1 lost
 * CH-37C—1 lost
 * CH-47A—83 lost
 * CH-47B—20 lost
 * CH-47C—29 lost
 * CH-54A—9 lost
 * H-13D—3 lost
 * H-37A—2 lost
 * OH-13S—147 lost
 * OH-23G—93 lost
 * OH-58A—45 lost
 * OH-6A—842 lost
 * UH-1—60 lost
 * UH-1A—1 lost
 * UH-1C—365 lost
 * UH-1D—886 lost
 * UH-1E—90 lost
 * UH-1F—18 lost
 * UH-1H—1,313 lost
 * UH-34D—176 lost

Republic of Vietnam aircraft

 * A-1 Skyraider – 225 lost
 * A-37A/B Dragonfly – 38 lost
 * AC-47 – 9 lost
 * C/AC-119G/K Stinger – 8 lost
 * C-7A Caribou – 6 lost
 * C/EC-47 Skytrain – 17 lost
 * C-123K Provider – 11 lost
 * C-130A Hercules – 2 lost
 * F-5A/B/C/E Freedom Fighter/Tiger II – ~250 lost (including 114 captured)
 * U/H-1D/H Iroquois (helicopter) – 332 lost
 * C/UH-34C/D/G Choctaw (helicopter) – 140 lost
 * CH-47A Chinook (helicopter) – 10 lost
 * O-1 Bird Dog – 152 lost
 * O-2A Skymaster – 2 lost
 * T-41D Mescalero – 1 lost
 * U-6A Beaver – 10 lost
 * U-17A/B Skywagon – 39 lost

North Vietnam captured 877 South Vietnamese aircraft at war's end.

Fixed wing
5 total
 * C-7 Caribou—3 total, 1 in combat; all from No. 35 Squadron RAAF
 * Caribou A4-193 was destroyed by mortar fire while taxiing at That Son (near the Cambodian border) on 29 March 1970.
 * English Electric Canberra—2 total, 2 in combat; both from No. 2 Squadron RAAF
 * First loss: Canberra A84-231 disappeared on 3 November 1970 on a night bombing mission in the northern 1st Corps Tactical Zone region of South Vietnam after dropping its bombs near Da Nang. Pilot Officer Robert Charles Carver (24) and Flying Officer Michael Patrick John Herbert (24), were both MIA until 30 July 2009 when their remains were positively identified.
 * Final loss: A84-228 shot down by two SA-2 SAM missiles on 14 March 1971; Wing Commander F. J. L. Downing and Flight Lieutenant A.J. Pinches were both rescued.

Rotary-wing

 * UH-1—6 total, all from No. 9 Squadron RAAF

Democratic Republic of Vietnam Aircraft

Claimed by VPAF: 154 MiG aircraft lost through all causes, including 131 in air combat (includes 63 MiG-17s, 8 MiG-19s and 60 MiG-21s)

Russian source: 65 MiG-21s, 5 MiG-19s, 75 MiG-17s lost through all causes. 2 Mi-4, 5 An-2, 5 Il-14, 1 MiG-15UTI, 1 Il-28, 1 L-29, 1 Lisunov Li-2 lost through all causes Total: 159 aircraft and 2 helicopter lost.

People's Republic of China aircraft

 * MiG-17 Fresco—1 thought to be shot down

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Haligonian

Haligonian may refer to:

 * of or from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
 * of or from Halifax, West Yorkshire, England
 * Haligonian, a 1925 schooner built to race Bluenose

title: Haligonian


text:
The Last DJ

The Last DJ is the 11th studio album by American rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The title track, "Money Becomes King", "Joe" and "Can't Stop the Sun" are all critical of greed in the music industry, which led to a song boycott by some radio stations.

A "limited edition" digipack version of the album was also released, including a DVD of music videos and other footage shot during the album's production.

The album reached number 9 on the Billboard 200, aided by the single "The Last DJ", which peaked at number 22 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in 2002. As of 2010, The Last DJ had sold 353,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The album marks the return of original Heartbreaker Ron Blair on bass guitar, replacing his own replacement, the ailing Howie Epstein. His return was late in the recording process, however, and Petty and Campbell contribute most of the bass work themselves.

The title track (which was the first single) and "Dreamville" were included on the compilation The Best of Everything.

Track listing
All songs written by Tom Petty except 8 and 12, co-written by Mike Campbell

Personnel
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
 * Tom Petty – guitars, vocals, piano, ukulele, bass guitar on "The Last DJ", "Money Becomes King", "Joe", "Like a Diamond", "Blue Sunday", "You and Me" and "Have Love Will Travel"
 * Mike Campbell – guitars, bass guitar on "Dreamville", "When a Kid Goes Bad", and "The Man Who Loves Women"
 * Benmont Tench – piano, organ, various keyboards
 * Scott Thurston – guitar, lap steel guitar, ukulele, background vocals
 * Ron Blair – bass guitar on "Lost Children" and "Can't Stop the Sun"
 * Steve Ferrone – drums

Additional musicians
 * Jon Brion – orchestration, conductor
 * Lindsey Buckingham – background vocals on "The Man Who Loves Women"
 * Lenny Castro – percussion

Production
 * Mike Campbell – producer
 * Richard Dodd – recording engineer
 * George Drakoulias – producer
 * Ryan Hewitt – assistant engineer
 * Steve McGrath – demo engineer
 * Tom Petty – producer
 * Jim Scott – recording engineer
 * Ed Thacker – additional engineer

title: The Last DJ


text:
Tug Fork

The Tug Fork is a tributary of the Big Sandy River, 159 mi long, in southwestern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Kentucky in the United States. Via the Big Sandy and Ohio rivers, it is part of the watershed of the Mississippi River.

It is also known as the Tug Fork River or as the Tug River. The United States Board on Geographic Names settled on "Tug Fork" as the stream's official name in 1975.

The Tug Fork rises in the Appalachian Mountains of extreme southwestern West Virginia, in southern McDowell County, near the Virginia state line. It flows in a meandering course through the mountains generally northwest, past Welch. Approximately 20 mi northwest of Welch, it briefly forms approximately 4 mi of the state line between West Virginia (northeast) and Virginia (southwest). For the remainder of its course it forms part of the boundary between West Virginia (east) and Kentucky (west), flowing northwest past Williamson, West Virginia. It joins the Levisa Fork at Louisa, Kentucky to form the Big Sandy.

The river flows through an especially remote mountainous region in its upper course. The river valley between Pike County, Kentucky and Mingo County, West Virginia was the scene of the infamous Hatfield–McCoy feud in the late 19th century.

Toponymist George R. Stewart writes about the origin of the name "Tug Fork". In 1756 a small army of Virginians and Cherokees conducted the Sandy Creek Expedition against the Shawnee. At one point they killed and ate two buffaloes and hung their hides on a tree. Later they returned and, being out of provisions, took the hides and cut them into thin strips called "tugs". These they roasted and ate. For this reason, the story goes, the stream was given the name "Tug." Stewart also points out another possible origin. Even if the story is true, the second explanation may have reinforced the name. In the Cherokee language "tugulu" refers to the forks of a stream, as in the Tugaloo River and other streams in former Cherokee lands named "tug".

title: Tug Fork