Interpol and 20 national police forces today unveiled history's biggest disaster-victim indentification system to unravel forensic data from the bodies of more than 5,000 tsunami dead in Thailand.
"This is like a world first," said Mr Jeff Emery, an Australian police forensic expert in charge of a team of about 60 detectives, doctors and pathologists from 20 countries. "It is using the world's best and latest technology."
The centre, set up in the offices of a telecoms company on the tsunami-hit Thai island of Phuket, will act as a giant database, cross-referencing dental records, fingerprints and DNA from corpses in Thailand against similar data from countries where people are listed as missing.
The painstaking process, which will involve close cooperation with police, dentists and victims' families in Thailand and dozens of overseas countries, is likely to take many months to complete, but is already starting to bear fruit.
"It's hard to put a time on it, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that this will go longer than six months," Mr Emery said. "However, we are very hopeful of some success shortly. We have some positive reports."
A total of 5,309 people are registered as dead in Thailand from the December 26th disaster. A further 3,370 are listed as missing and the government says it presumes they are among the 3,700 bodies still to be identified.
Roughly half the bodies identified so far have been foreign tourists, most of them from northern Europe.
The centre will give equal weight to processing data from Thai and foreign victims, countering criticism that international forensic teams were only interested in identifying foreigners.