The last victim, a woman in her forties, was found overnight and pulled from the wreckage of the rink in the resort of Bad Reichenhall whose roof collapsed under tonnes of snow on Monday.

Despite the fact that it took rescue workers days to find some of the victims, all of them died instantly, said doctors in the nearby Austrian city of Salzburg who performed autopsies on the bodies.

"The rescue workers could not have done more to save them even if they had been on the scene faster," forensic doctor Edith Tutsch-Bauer told the Austrian news agency APA.

A spokesman for the Bavarian state authorities said some 200 rescue workers were still at the rink to ensure that they have not failed to find any victims who were not among the list of people reported missing after the accident.

"When we move out, the state attorneys will move in," spokesman Christoph Abress said, adding that they hoped to complete the gruelling task later Thursday.

Twelve of the victims were children or teenagers, and the other three all women of around forty. All of them were from the region.

Thirty-four people were injured in the accident and some 13 of them remained in hospital but their lives were not in danger.

Psychologists on Thursday began counselling survivors of the disaster, including the school children who lost classmates and the rescue workers.

"This has been an enormous ordeal, including for the rescue teams," Abress said.

The grim accident has touched Germans and left many asking how this could have happened in an area that is accustomed to heavy winter snow storms.

"Why?" one woman simply wrote in an Internet book of condolences that has been set up by local authorities and signed by more than 5,000 people.

Bild newspaper on Thursday published photographs of smiling girls skating in the rink shortly before the collapse, while one of the survivors, teenager Elfriede Datz, told television she simply remembered a "big noise".

"My only thought was to get out," she said from hospital.

Authorities in the nearby town of Traunstein are investigating the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the rink's roof, which dates from

But a spokesman for the prosecutor's office said on Thursday that it could take months to establish the cause of the accident.

"Only then will we be able to see whether anybody is personally responsible. We cannot charge anybody until we know what caused the accident," spokesman Volker Ziegler said.

The mayor of Bad Reichenhall, Wolfgang Heitmeier, on Thursday told a press conference that a certificate issued in 2003 by local authorities stated that the roof of the building presented no risk.

"The structure of the roof ... is in a state which could be described as good," Heitmeier quoted from the document.

It added that there were signs of water damage but that these did not signify that there were any weakness in the structure.

According to reports by the local meteorological services, there was at least 180 tonnes of snow lying on the roof before it collapsed onto skaters on Monday, just 15 minutes before the rink was due to close for the day.

Pope Benedict XVI, who was born in the state of Bavaria, on Wednesday sent a telegram to the archbishop of Munich to express his condolences.

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