"Some 200 bone samples have already been transferred to our laboratory here and we will try to extract a DNA profile from them," a spokeswoman for the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons, Doune Porter, told

The remains were from victims of Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast of the United States in August, killing at least 1,400 people and causing widespread destruction to the New Orleans region.

The testing is to be carried out under an agreement between the commission and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, the Bosnian laboratory said in a statement.

Identification techniques based on DNA were developed in the Balkans in an attempt to discover the fate of some 40,000 missing people, mostly from Bosnia, following the conflict there in the early 1990s.

Since the first positive identification made in late 2001, some 8,850 remains have been identified and more than 16,000 have been DNA-profiled.

"The ICMP has obtained more DNA profiles from bone samples than any other laboratory in the world," Porter said.

DNA carries the hereditary information of living beings from generation to generation.

Matching the DNA taken from a victim's bone with one extracted from the blood of a living relative remains the only tool that can identify totally decomposed or incomplete remains.

The ICMP said the tests on Katrina victims would be less complicated and have a higher success rate than in the Balkans, where many remains were recovered more than a decade after being buried in mass graves.

"Hurricane Katrina is a relatively recent disaster, and in this case the quantity of DNA is much higher than in older bones," ICMP chairman James Kimsey said in the statement.

"We are expecting to have a success rate of 100 percent or close to that with the Katrina victim samples," said Kimsey.

The ICMP has already assisted US forensic experts in identifying victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, and Thai authorities in identifying victims from last year's tsunami disaster.

The Bosnian laboratory is also assisting Iraqi authorities in their efforts to discover the truth about thousands who went missing under former president Saddam Hussein's regime.

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