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ID sleuths provide closure

KHAO LAK, Thailand - One year after the Indian Ocean tsunami, the world's ID sleuths press on with their grisly task. In a DNA lab in Sarajevo, the experience drawn from Bosnia's mass graves is helping to put names to bodies in a morgue at a Thai resort 5,000 miles away.

DNA collected from relatives around the world, along with samples from items as mundane as a toothbrush, are being filtered through a high-tech, multinational operation to give a decent burial to the dead of the Dec. 26 disaster and a small measure of relief to their families.

In Thailand, the victims were from three dozen countries, many of which funded efforts to identify the dead, aided by Interpol and laboratories including the one in Sarajevo that works on victims from the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. The lab says that by early December its scientists had extracted and profiled the DNA from more than 1,600 of the 1,723 bone samples that arrived from Thailand, with more to come.

Of these, 665 were matched to victims, most of them Thais, but also 39 Swedes, 20 Germans, 11 Finns, four Britons and two Americans, according to Doune Porter, spokeswoman of the International Commission on Missing Persons which runs the Sarajevo lab.

Such an operation was impossible in Indonesia's Aceh province in northern Sumatra island, where the tsunami devoured whole towns and villages of poor fishermen, laborers and their families. Some communities were annihilated, leaving no one alive to help identify the dead.

[Last modified December 22, 2005, 00:59:14]