Experts fail to identify two exhumed Titanic victims
( 2001-05-21 15:56 ) (7 )

The bodies of two victims of the 1912 Titanic shipwreck exhumed in Canada Friday will never be positively identified, according to researchers here.

The bone fragments of two Titanic victims, one man and one woman, exhumed from a cemetery here were too degraded to permit identification via DNA tests, according to Nancy Angus, a researcher at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

The researchers are now focusing their efforts on the remains of a third exhumed body, thought to belong to a small boy around the age of two.

Of the 1,480 victims of the April 14, 1912 shipwreck, 121 are buried in Halifax's Fairview cemetery. Of the victims, 43 have never been conclusively identified.

The Lakehead researchers, joined by their colleagues from Laurentienne University in Sudbury, Ontario, launched the project with a team of Halifax-based experts at the request of families hoping to confirm their links with the identified shipwreck victims.

While two of the bodies were too decomposed for identification by genetic testing, the little boy's remains were found to be in better condition. Researchers hope to be able to identify him from bone fragments, in an analysis that could take as long as six months, said project leader Alan Ruffman.