Re:Thieves Who Steal Sunken Warships, Right Down to the Bolts
by LoungeFlyZ on Saturday May 06, 2017 @04:11PM
(#14282015)
With a bus/truck they remove the bodies (usually). These ships went down with people in them and are graves. There is a difference.
It would be like you being buried in a coffin in a stone church and then one day someone decides they want the stones and they take the whole church ... including you :) As a relative i would be pretty pissed about that too.
If they were correctly identifying bodies and returning them to their families for proper burial etc... then it might be ok to reuse the steel.
In this case though the salvagers are not taking the bones out, nor the personal effects. They are taking huge amounts of steel, brass and copper, none of which were personal artifacts or property of a single one of the persons who died at the site.
To call this grave robbing, then removing a wrecked bus or truck from an accident site on the side of the freeway would have to be considered grave robbing as well. If the person removing the bus also took the body, wedding rings and gold teeth of the victims, that would be a crime. But the person removing the bus isn't doing that.