Thousands of frustrated Hurricane Katrina victims who lost their homes, possessions and livelihoods have yet to retrieve bodies of loved ones lying anonymously in crowded morgues, still unidentified more than five weeks after the disaster struck.

Officials in Louisiana underscored just how long many families will have to wait when they announced Thursday that the bodies of only 73 of Katrina's 988 Louisiana victims have been released to relatives. It could take up to a year to identify the dead and return the bodies, authorities admitted.

The process is going especially slow in Louisiana, where officials are insisting on performing full autopsies on most bodies. They are dealing not just with drownings, heart attacks and strokes but also with possible homicides, suicides and the potential threat of litigation.

At two gigantic and heavily guarded makeshift morgues in Mississippi and Louisiana, a grueling eight-station process of body identification has been going on for weeks.

Detailed photos of the bodies are taken including tattoos or other identifying characteristics. Personal effects such as jewelry are collected. There is an external examination, a full body X-ray, fingerprinting, and dental exams. And a DNA sample is taken.

Clothing is then placed on the body and it is put in a casket where a "tracker" assigned to the body signs off on it. Only then are relatives informed of the body's whereabouts, officials said.

In Mississippi, where the process is taking place in tents outside Gulfport, Miss., in a parking lot next to a recreational water park, identifications have moved at a faster pace than in Louisiana.

There have been fewer bodies to identify - 221 so far - and authorities there are performing full autopsies on a limited basis. Instead, specialists visibly look over the bodies for signs of unusual trauma and so far have performed relatively few autopsies.

"Our goal is to provide closure to the family members," said Douglas Yauch, the commander of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team in Mississippi.

In Louisiana, however, that closure has been hampered by bureaucratic snafus, bickering, and the decision to autopsy a large proportion of the victims.

Minyard told reporters that pathologists and others in St. Gabriel Parish are working "under the most adverse conditions." He said his temporary trailer office at the encampment did not receive a telephone line until Wednesday.

Minyard, who must ultimately sign off on the death records of those who were found in New Orleans, said he wants to see full autopsies - rather than just an identification examination - performed on "almost everybody."

But with less than 15 autopsies typically being performed each day, the bodies remain stacked up in refrigerated semi-truck trailers. He said about 300 autopsies must still be done and he has requested more help from other states.

Minyard spoke openly about tensions between local and federal officials, saying only five autopsies could be done Thursday morning because the federal response team was finished with their identification work early in the day and closed the morgue.

Some identification efforts have been slowed too, he said, because paperwork that is supposed to show where the bodies were recovered was lost or not completed.

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state official in charge of the morgue, said "presumptive" identification has been made on about 340 bodies. But he said identification has been further hampered by glitches in a computer system that was supposed to tie together morgue data with details about clothing, jewelry and other information provided by family members. "There was a disconnect," Cataldie said. "The databases weren't even talking to each other."

Forty-one percent of the dead at the morgue are African-Americans, while 35 percent are white. No information on race has yet been determined for about 23 percent, and ages have not yet been determined for nearly two-thirds of victims.

The majority died of natural causes such as strokes and heart attacks that were triggered by stress from the storm, Cataldie said. Eight bodies have been recovered with gunshot wounds, but officials said they have not been classified as homicides because the circumstances of the deaths are unknown.

But families already broken in spirit are seething at the laborious process that doesn't even allow acknowledgement as to the whereabouts of their dead relatives or the condition of their bodies.

Dugas, 79, had the misfortune of needing kidney and colon surgery two days before Katrina swamped New Orleans. When his family last saw him before evacuating on Aug. 28, Dugas was clinging to life in a New Orleans hospital.

For weeks, the Dugas family lived with relatives and in hotels because they were unable to return to their flooded St. Bernard Parish. They phoned hospitals, friends, law enforcement, and relief agencies to find out what happened to their father.

Two weeks ago, Puig and another sister went to Louisiana and provided DNA samples so coroners could match it with the piles of corpses in hopes of finding their father.

They have yet to hear back from agencies, Puig said. If they could only get admittance to the morgue, the sisters say, they could find their father quickly because he sported a heart or a rose tattoo emblazoned with "Olga" - his wife's name.

"I'd feel a lot better if I could find my dad's body," she said. "If I have to, I will carry him around with me everyday until he can get to a right place ... I just want him close to me, to hold him and say a proper goodbye."

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