Identification of Austrian tunnel fire dead could take a month

Pathologists in Austria have said that identifying victims of Saturday's tunnel fire could take up to a month.

Bodies of the estimated 162 victims have been burned beyond recognition, requiring individual DNA tests on bodies that will take up to four days each.

"The skin is so badly blackened that we cannot even make out scars and tattoos. An identification by relatives is not possible," said Ms Edith TutschBauer, Austria's chief pathologist.

Recovery teams removed the first bodies yesterday, nearly 48 hours after the train packed with skiers caught fire in a tunnel in the Austrian Alps. The 46 bodies taken away were of skiers who escaped the burning train but were asphyxiated as they ran uphill through the tunnel in the Kitzsteinhorn glacier.

The entire recovery operation could take up to a week. It will be more difficult to remove the bodies of victims who were trapped inside the carriages, a rescue spokesman, Mr Roland Floirair, said.

"The body parts are really very charred so it is difficult to see which person it is," he said.

The six-man rescue teams first entered the cold and dark tunnel late on Sunday evening through a service shaft above the train.

Recovery teams in the tunnel last night faced a 40-minute trek up 2,000 steps to the surface, where psychologists were waiting to help them deal with the horrific scenes they had witnessed.

A British victim of the blaze would have caught an earlier train but allowed an elderly passenger to go ahead of him, his wife said yesterday.

The Foreign Office here identified the man as Mr Kevin Challis (40), originally from Dorset. He had been living in the nearby town of Kaprun with his Austrian wife and daughter and had been working as a ski instructor.

His wife, Christl, said her husband was supposed to have travelled to the ski slopes on an earlier train with their daughter, Siobhan. "Apparently he let an old person go in front of him into the train where Siobhan was, and he was behind, the last one who didn't go on," she said.

Mr Gerhard Hanetseder, an Austrian, and his daughter were among the 12 survivors of the fire. He told yesterday how he was unable to open the carriage doors but in the growing panic escaped through a smashed window.

"How I got out, I do not know because the gap wasn't very wide. The fire was spreading more and more above me and we ran down the tunnel."

Similar funicular trains elsewhere in Austria and in France were taken out of commission yesterday until safety checks could be performed.

Austrian authorities admitted yesterday evening that they were still unsure as to what had caused the fire, or why the flames spread so quickly.

"We considered a fire practically impossible. There are no motors, no fluids and everything is made of fireproof materials," said Mr Karl-Johann Hartig of Austria's transport ministry.

Revised figures place the total number of dead at 162, mostly Austrians and Germans, including a young freestyle ski champion and her parents.