This is the first time that CDFD has used the sophisticated DNA fingerprinting method to identify a foreign national who vanished while on a visit to India, a CDFD spokesman said.

The case pertains to a skeleton suspected to be that of Diana Clare Roulete of Auckland in New Zealand, who mysteriously vanished in August last year. The Varanasi police suspected that she was murdered, but did not have her body or any other clinching evidence.

Diana was missing after she had checked into a lodge and was last seen with a local tourist guide Dharmadev Yadav. When her father Allen Jak Roulete did not hear from her, he came down from New Zealand to trace his daughter and formally lodged a complaint with the Bhelpur Police Station in Varanasi.

The police was finally able to track down Yadav in Mumbai. On sustainedinterrogation, he admitted that he had murdered Diana and buried the body in his house.

The police subsequently recovered a skeleton with some brown hair from Yadav's house. However, to establish a murder, the skeleton had to be identified as that of Diana. It was then that the Varanasi police got in touch with CDFD.

The remains of Diana were sent to CDFD and her father gave his blood samples for matching the DNA profile with that of his daughter. Detailed DNA analysis revealed that the remains were that of Diana.