Authorities earlier planned to send samples to China from the skeleton, which was uncovered on December 7 as residents cleared garbage and debris from woods hundreds of meters from the beach in the Takua Pa district of Phang Nga province.

The samples will leave Thailand for Bosnia on Tuesday along with four bone samples of other tsunami victims who remain unidentified, police Colonel Khemarin Hassiri told AFP, adding results were expected within a month.

He declined to say why the samples would no longer go to China.

The woman's skeleton -- believed to be that of a doctor -- would be transferred from Phang Nga to the Disaster Victim Identification unit in neighbouring Phuket island on Monday, Khemarin said.

Initial testing indicated the woman appeared to have been dead for about a year. However it remains unclear if she was Thai or foreign.

Testing will be done in the hope the results will match DNA samples from one of the more than 700 people still missing, Khemarin said on Saturday.

The discovery on Wednesday was the first time remains of a tsunami victim have been found in Thailand since May.

The sophisticated Bosnian laboratory, the International Commission on Missing Persons, said in September it had identified 326 victims of the tsunami in Thailand using DNA analysis.

Most of those identified were Thais, followed by victims from Sweden, Germany and Finland, commission officials said in September.

Some 1,500 samples were sent from Thailand for testing after an agreement in May between the commission and the Thai government.

About 5,400 people, including at least 2,436 foreigners from 37 countries, were killed when the tsunami hit Thailand last December 26.

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.