## 1 Introduction  
According to the definition adopted by the European Parliament, a disaster is any situation that has or may have a serious impact on people, the environment or property, including cultural heritage [1, 2]. Between 2007 and 2019, 106 disasters occurred in Europe, of which fires were predominant at 60 occurrences, with at least one fire having catastrophic consequences occurring each year [3, 4]. Looking at individual European countries, the highest number of disasters have occurred in Greece, with as many as 22 between 2007 and 2019, and Portugal, with 15 disasters during the same time period. Over the past 30 years, floods have affected 5.5 million people in the EU, caused 3,000 deaths, and resulted in more than EUR 170 billion in economic damage [5]. In 2021, floods in Germany and Belgium caused more than 200 deaths and EUR 44 billion worth of damage. Europe is also not free from attacks of a terrorist nature, initiated by organizations of various origins [6]. As Europol statistics show, in 2019, there were 119 attacks of a terrorist nature on European territories [7], most of them (as many as 64) took place in the United Kingdom. Disasters, both natural and man-made, as well as terrorist attacks, very often result in large numbers of casualties and fatalities [8]. These are mass events that typically involve hundreds or thousands of people, often completely random and unrelated to the scene. These factors make it very difficult to clearly identify the victim, which should be performed with the utmost care and in the shortest possible time [9]. In order to facilitate and standardize the victim identification procedure, the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) established the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) procedure detailing and unifying the entire process of identifying victims of mass event disasters [10]. The guidelines, published in the form of a regularly updated guide (Disaster Victim Identification Guide), constitute a set of principles on which identification procedures in individual Member States should be based, which will greatly facilitate and improve possible international cooperation [11]. The victim identification procedure according to the DVI Guide follows a four-step process. First, the scene is investigated, which includes securing the site, photographing, recording and describing the evidence on the postmortem data form, transporting human remains and property, and securing and transporting physical evidence [12]. In the second step, an autopsy is performed, during which specialists from various fields try to obtain data allowing for identification of the victims, such as fingerprints, odontological (dental) data [13], radiological data, DNA samples, and further photographs presenting special marks, unique for the victims--attoos, scars, surgical implants with serial numbers. In addition to the bodies, personal items found immediately adjacent to the corpses are also cleaned and examined, which may include jewelry, clothing fragments, and other personal items to aid in identification. PM forms are again completed on this basis. A comparison of postmortem data with antemortem data is necessary to verify the identity of the victim. To this end, as part of the third step of the DVI process, family members, relatives, and friends of potential victims are interviewed, during which data such as a detailed description of the missing person, information about personal items, dental and medical records, X-rays, photographs, fingerprints, and DNA samples, if possible, are collected. A list of potential victims is compiled from police reports of disappearances or, for example, passenger lists in the case of plane crashes. The collected data are used to fill out the AnteMortem (AM) data forms. The final step in the DVI procedure is to compare the collected data from the PM and AM forms and match them to determine the identity of all victims [14].