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A Hong Kong man who lost his wife in the Boxing Day tsunami has hit out at the holdups and lack of co-ordination in the hunt for her body.

Last month, Kevin Quinn, a financial analyst  with HSBC, left the task of finding his wife to the Thai  and international authorities.

He had decided that there was little he could do.

It was not until he returned to Phuket last week that the Briton realised he was wrong. Seven weeks after the disaster, neither the Hong Kong authorities nor the  British government have sent samples of his wife's DNA, fingerprints and dental data for matching with corpses.

Mr Quinn also found the Thai authorities were now using fingerprints and dental records instead of DNA samples to identify bodies because they are faster and more effective. Previously, the emphasis had been on DNA testing.

'We feel very disappointed and let down,' Mr Quinn said.

'I think other families should find out that DNA is not being used. They need to send fingerprints.'

A Security Bureau spokeswoman was unaware the Thai investigators were using fingerprint identification.

Mr Quinn, 37, and his wife, Rachel, 34, were at a beach in Khao Lak, north of Phuket, when the tsunami struck  on December 26. He suffered leg injuries, but survived by grabbing a balcony railing when the waves washed him into a second-floor hotel room.

The trip to Thailand was the couple's first since they relocated to Hong Kong in  October.

They had planned  to travel to a variety of places in Asia.

'I think I've accepted that Rachel's dead, but I still have to go through a grieving process that I probably haven't gone through yet because we haven't had the funeral.

'Delaying it is just going to make it longer and harder. It's very hard to look at my future until I bring her home,' he said.

Police colonel Jakkrit Singhsilarak, a supervisor of the Thai disaster victim identification unit, said his team had been identifying 20 to 30 bodies a day by matching fingerprints and dental X-rays.

He said DNA samples sent for testing in Bangkok, China and Italy had not always produced a result. Of  100 samples sent to China, he had  positive results for only half. 'It's very hard sometimes to find the result from DNA,' he said.

Twenty-eight  Hong Kong residents are still missing after the tsunami, all of them  in Thailand. Sixteen  Hong Kong people have been confirmed dead.

Colonel Jakkrit estimated that identifying the remaining 3,000 bodies in Thailand would take another five months.



Tsunami survivor hits out at delays in finding  wife who died