Thailand to bury last of tsunami victims in Dec

BANGKOK, Nov 27: Thailand, where the 2004 tsunami killed almost 6,000 people and left nearly 3,000 missing, will bury the last 110 unidentified bodies in December, officials said today.

DNA samples taken from the bodies would enable investigators to continue work on identifying the victims, said Police Colonel Khemmarin Hassiri, head of the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) centre.

The Thai team took over in January after most international experts ended their role in what has been called the world's biggest forensics investigation.

Khemmarin said the 110 bodies would be put in aluminum coffins and buried on December 6 at a cemetery near the TTVI centre in Phang Nga, the southern Thai province hit hardest by the tsunami which wreaked its worst havoc in Indonesia.

Another 300 unidentified bodies were buried in the same cemetery over the past two months.

More than 100 bodies identified but not yet claimed by relatives would be kept in cold storage at the TTVI centre.

Among them were one Filipino, one Turk, one Nepali, 73 from Myanmar and 27 Thais, he said.

Thailand's official death toll in the Indian Ocean disaster is 5,395, half of them foreign tourists.

Khemmarin said ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had ordered the burials last year, but the process had been delayed due to bureaucratic problems.

''Thaksin said scenes of containers with bodies was bad for tourism and he wanted them go quickly,'' Khemmarin said.

REUTERS

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