Dental records and DNA needed to identify victims

THE bodies of some victims of the tsunamis that smashed into southern Thailand will never be found, while many others that are recovered could take months to identify, officials warned yesterday.

Half of those killed in Thailand are foreigners - many holidaymakers from Europe.

But nine days after the St Stephen’s Day tragedy, many of the corpses are so bloated that they can’t be identified visually, so dental records and DNA tests must be used.

“It’s difficult to distinguish a blonde European and an Asian,” Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai said.

More than 200 forensic experts from Thailand and 18 other countries are working frantically at Buddhist temples - serving as makeshift morgues - to identify the dead.

At one morgue, several hundred bodies lay on the ground, covered by tarpaulins or body bags. Another hundred lay in the sun. A man sprayed a cloud of disinfectant.

“To match them will all take quite some time, it could take weeks or it could even take months,” Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said during a visit to the beach resort island of Phuket. “There probably will be some bodies that will never be found, and we have to prepare ourselves for that as well.”

With 5,246 confirmed deaths and 4,499 people still listed as missing, Thailand’s official death toll could be as high as 8,000, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has warned. The total number of people killed in 11 nations was expected to exceed 150,000.

The bodies of foreigners are kept in air-conditioned containers, while those of Thai victims are temporarily buried in nearby cemeteries, waiting for relatives to retrieve them for cremation. Some bodies are being packed in dry ice to slow down decomposition in the tropical heat.

Officials have been trying to increase refrigeration capacity to store bodies while DNA samples and dental records are obtained.