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December 31, 1969
Source: The New Zealand
Herald - Reuters
Original Article: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10119324 It may take
up to five years to put names to the 2,547 unidentified victims in Thailand -- half of which are believed to be foreign tourists -- of the December 26
tsunami, a senior official said on Thursday.
An international forensic team, undertaking what is believed to be the biggest victim identification
project in history, had identified 1,176 bodies since it began work on January 13, police colonel Pornprasert Ganjanarintr told Reuters.
"It
will take at least another two to five years to finish identifying these bodies," said Pornprasert of the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification centre on
the resort island of Phuket.
Thailand's official death toll from the Indian Ocean disaster stands at 5,395, of which 1,953 are believed to be
foreigners. A further 2,929 people are listed as missing.
The forensic operation, involving Interpol and at least 20 other national police
forces, uses fingerprints, dental records and DNA put names to the bodies.
Pornprasert said families of people reported missing were being slow
to come forward with sufficient "ante mortem" data for matching against samples taken from the corpses.
"We are slowing down now
as it is getting more difficult due to insufficient information from the relatives," said Pornprasert, who told Reuters in February it would take up to
six months to identify 4,000 tsunami victims.
The pace of releasing identified bodies has dropped to about 10 a day from 20 to 40 over the last
few weeks, he said.
Decoding DNA from tsunami victims in Thailand, many of them tourists, has been harder than expected, Derek Forest, a British
detective in charge of the operation, said last month.
Forest said labs in China, which took the first batch of samples for genetic
fingerprinting, and then Europe and the United States, were struggling because decay set in so fast it had damaged the genetic data in tissue samples.
Pornprasert declined to break down the identified victims by nationality but another official at the centre said Swedes were the largest group with
351 victims, followed by 323 Germans, and 105 Finns.
- REUTERS |
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