ANALYSE DE LA DISPERSION DES FRAGMENTS HUMAINS

Abstract

From a forensic perspective, hand-grenade suicide is a rare
and thus under-studied situation. We report here the case of
a man who ended his life with a defensive Frag Gren M72
hand-grenade where forensic examination of the body and
the environment conclusively identify the explosive used and
allow us to hypothesize the subject’s position at the time of the
explosion. The moral, legal and hygienic obligation to completely recover the body has also provided us the opportunity
to quantify its fragmentation and its dispersion caused by
the explosion. In that particular case, we observed that the
explosion has scattered 403 macroscopic parts over an elliptical zone of 1737 square metre (88,5 metres by 25 metres).