A FORENSIC expert based at Dundee University has flown to Thailand to help identify dead bodies recovered from the tsunami disaster.

Professor Sue Black, head of the anatomy and forensic anthropology department, flew out to Phuket on Hogmanay to lend her expertise where a significant number of bodies have been retained in refrigerated trucks to preserve them for identification.

She was approached by Houston-based organisation Kenyon International Emergency Services to make up a team of experts from America, Australia, Britain and Singapore, and will remain working in the aftermath of the disaster for a further two weeks.

Her work will include a range of forensic disciplines including anthropology, odontology (dental work), fingerprinting and DNA testing to enable bodies to be identified and returned to their loved ones for a proper burial.

Kenyon, which is globally renowned in mass fatality and emergency response, has acted on behalf of air, sea, and rail carriers, commercial and private organizations, insurance companies and governments both nationally and internationally at over 260 incidents since responding to the first civil aviation disaster in 1929.

Kenyon disaster teams are dispatched within hours after an accident has occurred, with teams strategically located throughout the world. Services offered through Kenyon’s Disaster Response Teams (DRT) are contingent upon the needs of the client.

Professor Black last week spoke of her frustration over the British government’s failure to react to the identity crisis in the affected countries by making use of the level of expertise in this country to quickly send out a team of forensic experts.

She said the country was being “internationally embarrassed” by its failure to send out a team of identification experts, which she said was also the case at the time of the Bali bombing.

Professor Black is also director of the Centre for International Forensic Assistance, which was launched in 2001 with the aim of being able to offer forensic assistance globally when needed.

CIFA includes 400 forensic practitioners, representing about 35 different countries, with around 200 people in the UK alone with expertise in various areas of forensic medicine who could be called upon to help in the current circumstances.