Three months after the huge waves swept across the Indian Ocean and killed at least 273,000 people, the world's largest international forensics process ever undertaken has yet to identify half of the victims in Thailand.

Some 5,395 people died in six Thai provinces, about half of them foreign holidaymakers. The victims hailed from dozens of nations, and governments from Europe to New Zealand have called for speedy action to return their dead.

A total of 2,932 people are still listed as missing, 909 of them foreigners, Thai authorities said Friday.

One of the top forensic investigators overseeing work here predicts it will be another year before the bulk of bodies are identified.

"I think it would be foolish to be considering any shorter length of time than eight to 12 months," Karl Kent, a joint chief of staff at the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) information centre on Phuket, told AFP.

Thai officials say 1,010 bodies have been identified through the DVI process and the tally is increasing by the day.

But according to Kent, an Australian forensic pathologist, the number still undergoing the Interpol-accepted process stands at 2,700, in part due to problems with obtaining clean DNA samples from victims, laboratory difficulties and the sheer magnitude of the undertaking.

Some 1,200 corpses have been identified and repatriated, DVI director police general Nopadol Somboonsub told AFP in Bangkok, adding he did not know the specific countries to which the bodies have been returned.

Sweden was one of the countries hardest-hit outside Asia, with 544 dead or missing, most of them holidaymakers in Thailand. So far 310 of its victims have been identified, with 300 repatriated, ambassador Jonas Hafstrom said in Bangkok.

"Those were the easier cases," matched mainly through dental records, Hafstrom told AFP. "The more difficult ones are to come."

The time-consuming process "might spill over to 2006", he said. "We are all doing our best to identify as many as possible, as quickly as possible."

It has been a gruesome task. Thousands of corpses were left rotting in the sun or in standing water in the days after the disaster.

Recovery crews took bodies to Buddhist temples north of Phuket, transforming them into makeshift morgues, but refrigeration took days to arrive and decomposition hindered the DVI work.

More than 300 professionals from 30 countries have converged on southwestern Thailand to help in the process, which involves analysing dental records, fingerprints, physical features such as tattoos, and DNA samples.

The DVI centre on Phuket has 60 experts on hand to coordinate the data.

Because of a lack of usable ante-mortem data, such as samples from toothbrushes that were swept away, investigators turn to missing victims' families for DNA or other sampling.

Colonel Ponprasert Kanchanarin, Thai coordinator of the centre, said DVI investigators may take up to three years to finish their job, particularly because of a lack of information from Thai victims' relatives.

"About 90 percent of the successful identifications came from dental records, around 10 percent from fingerprints, and less than one percent from DNA," Ponprasert said.

A Western diplomatic source said just "three to four percent" of victims repatriated to his country had been identified by DNA.

Slowing the process have been problems involving a laboratory in Beijing, where experts have studied 600 DNA samples since January, DVI officials said.

Phuket halted sending samples to the lab for weeks because the Chinese reported no results on some teeth samples, and a lower level of success for bone samples than experts had expected, according to Kent.

Labs in South Korea, Australia and Britain were engaged to check the work, and it was determined that the samples themselves were too denuded.

DNA experts improved their sampling methods and testing at the Chinese and other labs has resumed.

Some 500 new samples are to be sent to China next week, with hundreds more to follow to labs in other countries that have offered help, including Sweden, Britain and France.

Acknowledging the collective trauma afflicting relatives of France's 95 dead and missing, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier spent four hours with them this month to answer what he described as their "difficult and grave questions" about progress in the DVI process.

Despite a highly publicised spat which saw the police in a squabble with Thailand's top forensics expert over control of DVI at the temple morgues, diplomats praise Thai authorities for their efforts.

"They have gone out of their way in many respects," Canadian ambassador Denis Comeau said.

"When you consider the scope of the disaster and the unparalleled cooperation that has taken place between these countries, this has unfolded as well as it could have," he said.

The Times of London reported this month that Thai officials had quietly decided to abandon the identification of victims because the process was hampering the kingdom's campaign to lure back tourists.

But the Tourism Authority of Thailand denied the report.

"Thai authorities respect the sensitivity of this situation and will continue in their recovery operations, with humanitarian assistance coming from all over the world, until all persons are identified," TAT said in a statement.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.