It’s challenging enough to identify a unknown deceased body found in the person’s home city.
It’s more challenging to identify one somewhere else in the person’s home country.
And when the body is found outside the person’s home country…that’s when organizations such as INTERPOL step in.
“Identify Me is a public appeal to identify women whose bodies were found in six European countries, many of whom are believed to have been murdered.
“Most are cold cases; women who died 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. They were found in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or Spain.
“Despite extensive police investigations, these women were never identified, and evidence suggests that some of them could have come from other countries. Who they are, where they are from and why they were in these countries is unknown.”
INTERPOL issues a variety of colored notices to its member countries, including the “Black Notice” to seek information on unidentified bodies. The “Identify Me” program is a public appeal for a small subset of these people.
Here’s one of INTERPOL’s success stories, “The woman in pink“:
“On 3 July 2005, the body of a woman was found at the 84 km mark on the Vila road in the town of Viladecans (province of Barcelona). The woman had been dead for less than 24 hours; the cause of death was suspicious….
“A breakthrough came in 2025 when police in Türkiye ran the fingerprints associated with ‘The woman in pink’ through a national biometric database, resulting in a match with Russian national Liudmila Zavada, aged 31 at the time of her death. The match was subsequently confirmed through kinship DNA analysis using the DNA of one of Liudmila Zavada’s close relatives.”
So follow the trail:
- There was a woman from Russia.
- A deceased woman’s body was found in Spain.
- Decades later, the deceased women was identified as the Russian woman via biometrics (fingerprints) in Türkiye.
- The identification was confirmed via DNA analysis.
A true case of cross-national collaboration.
Bredemarket 