Lab working to ID remains

Indonesia and Sri Lanka were hit the hardest.
KHAO LAK, Thailand (AP) -- 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 holiday 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 the relatives left behind.
But for those whose loved ones have simply vanished without a trace, there's little to be done beyond running a picture in a newspaper, in the faint hope that someone will notice. Thailand, where half the 5,395 dead were foreign holidaymakers, has at least benefited from a big and expensive DNA effort.
Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where the earthquake and tsunami claimed most of the 216,000 dead and missing, have no such luxury.
International tragedy
In Thailand, the giant waves inflicted a truly international tragedy, striking at peak vacation season along a coastline lined with hotels.
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 exhaustive intercontinental operation was impossible in Indonesia's Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra island, where the tsunami devoured whole towns and villages of poor fishermen, laborers and their families. There some communities were annihilated, leaving no one alive to help identify the dead.
One last effort
Hope Some still hold out hope.
Dewi Marlinda, a 23-year-old teacher in Aceh, plans to post a newspaper advertisement for her missing daughter, Tasya Zahara, who would now be 5.
"This will be our last effort. If this is not successful, I will accept my daughter is lost," she said.
"But we still hope she is alive; maybe she has been adopted by a family who love her so much that they don't want to report that she is living with them."
In Aceh, backhoes dumped tens of thousands of dead into mass graves, while large numbers of corpses were swept out to sea.
In Sri Lanka, unrefrigerated bodies lay in empty rooms and hospital corridors until they could be buried en masse. Bodies swelled beyond recognition in the tropical heat.
Thailand was lucky that roads and other infrastructure survived around the crowded resort island of Phuket. Kenyon, a disaster management firm based in Houston, Texas, shipped in X-ray machines, mortuary supplies and refrigerated containers for the dead. The Australian government paid the bill.
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