Thailand raises estimated number of foreign dead in tsunami by 900

BANGKOK : Thailand's interior ministry Friday added more than 900 bodies to its estimate of the number of foreigners among 5,313 people killed in last month's tsunami.

The ministry's disaster management unit increased its estimate of the foreign dead by 931 to 2,171 in its latest daily update.

Those believed to be Thai increased slightly to 1,733, leaving 1,409 bodies of unknown origin.

The sudden shift in figures came just five days after the December 26 disaster management unit called into question the national origin of nearly 2,000 bodies.

An interior ministry official who compiled the figures said the latest increase came because of new DNA test results.

"It's a result of the stepped-up identification operation. DNA tests came out overnight," the official said from the Phuket provincial office.

He said the results received from the samples on these 900 bodies did not mean the process of identifying the bodies was complete, only that authorities now believed they knew whether the corpses were Thai.

But Thailand's leading forensic expert, Porntip Rojanasunan, who is leading a massive forensics operation at a Buddhist temple-turned-morgue in Phang Nga province, said DNA could only identify the gender of a body and not its race or nationality.

"DNA can tell whether the victim was a man or woman. It cannot say whether a victim was Thai or foreign," she said.

"The figures were not released by me," she said.

The number of missing continued to slip meanwhile, as authorities followed up on missing persons reports, dropping to 3,238, including 1,055 foreigners.

- AFP, Source: channelnewsasia.com

DNA tests to determine whether male or female.

Does decomposition preclude even a visual ID of gender now? Wow.

DNA tests to determine whether male or female. 

Does decomposition preclude even a visual ID of gender now? Wow.

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I think Dr Porntip was being a little extreme in her expression, but I have an idea of where she's coming from.

While you may be able to tell populations apart from DNA samples, it can be a little harder with individuals. Geneticists aren't joking when they say racial differences are differences in gene frequency. As an example of the mixing you can have, 3% of Filipino Y chromsomes appear to be European. And how could you possibly tell the nationality of a luuk farang? More prosaicially, DNA doesn't change when you change citizenship.