Using autosomal and X-chromosomal SNPs to identify a victim of the 1956 Marcinelle mining disaster

Magnus D Vigeland; Stijn Desmyter; Pernilla Haage; Henrik Nordtorp; Femke Van Puymbrouck; Adam Staadig; Andreas Tillmar; Beatrijs Vanhooydonck; Thore Egeland

doi:10.1016/j.fsigen.2025.103409

Using autosomal and X-chromosomal SNPs to identify a victim of the 1956 Marcinelle mining disaster

Forensic Sci Int Genet. 2025 Dec 12:82:103409. doi: 10.1016/j.fsigen.2025.103409. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Magnus D Vigeland¹, Stijn Desmyter², Pernilla Haage³, Henrik Nordtorp⁴, Femke Van Puymbrouck², Adam Staadig⁵, Andreas Tillmar⁵, Beatrijs Vanhooydonck², Thore Egeland⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Forensic Sciences, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, 0424, Norway. Electronic address: magnusdv@gmail.no.
² National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC), Brussels, B-1120, Belgium.
³ Department of Forensic Genetics and Forensic Toxicology, National Board of Forensic Medicine, Linköping, SE-587 58, Sweden.
⁴ Department of Forensic Sciences, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, 0424, Norway; Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, 0316, Norway.
⁵ Department of Forensic Genetics and Forensic Toxicology, National Board of Forensic Medicine, Linköping, SE-587 58, Sweden; Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Linköping University, Linköping, SE-581 83, Sweden.
⁶ Department of Forensic Sciences, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, 0424, Norway; Faculty of Chemistry, Biotechnology and Food Sciences, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, 1433, Norway.

PMID: 41397326
DOI: 10.1016/j.fsigen.2025.103409

Abstract

The 1956 mining disaster in Marcinelle, Belgium, claimed 262 lives, among them 14 victims who could not be identified at the time. Their remains were exhumed in 2021 for identification, including DNA testing. We report here on the successful genetic identification of one of these victims, achieved by matching against three distant relatives using the FORCE SNP panel. In addition to likelihood ratio (LR) calculations, we implemented a novel identity-by-descent (IBD) segment detector suitable for low-density SNP panels and applied it to both the autosomal and X-chromosomal data. This study confirms that SNP panels can resolve long-standing missing person cases by matching against distant relatives, and highlights the utility of IBD segment detection as a supplement to LRs in such cases. Finally, it demonstrates the power of X-chromosomal SNP analysis when the pedigree permits it.

Keywords: DVI; Hidden Markov model; IBD segment detection; Kinship testing; Missing person identification; Pedsuite; SNP panel; X-chromosomal kinship.