Information on missing political activists including Siam Theerawut, Surachai Danwattananusorn and Wanchalearm Satsaksit has been collected and the Justice Ministry's new app will be used to find them, Minister Somsak Thepsutin said yesterday.
He was speaking at the launch of an app called "U Nai" (Where Are You?) developed by the Central Institute of Forensic Science (Cifs) to centralise information and provide faster identification of missing people.
"In the cases of Siam Theerawut, Surachai Danwattananusorn and Wanchalearm Satsaksit, the missing activists, we don't know where they went missing," Mr Somsak said.
"But we have collected information from their families. This application will hold the information, will serve as eyes and ears that will help solve these cases."
U Nai will allow people to access the missing persons database equally. They can check reports of missing persons and share information via social media, the minister said.
He added the information would also support Cifs, which collects bodies that are found, their DNA and fingerprints, to establish the identities of the bodies and find their relatives.
The information received through the app will also go on a central database, he said. Cifs director Songsak Raksaksakul said the institute's database has records of 3,170 missing people and 5,360 unclaimed bodies.
Of these bodies, 2,643 have been positively identified and the institute also keeps about 1,500 skeletons, which have not yet been identified.
Many more identified bodies are being stored at the Sawang Foundation in Nakhon Nayok.