It could be months before the body found last week at the site of a propane plant explosion in Toronto is identified.

Part-time Sunrise Propane employee Parminder Saini, 24, of Brampton has been missing since the explosions more than a week ago forced thousands of north Toronto residents to evacuate their homes.

Saini came to Canada in December on a student visa, according to reports, and was attending Sheridan College in Brampton. His family is in India and they are anxiously awaiting word of his fate.

However, Toronto police say positive identification of the body found in the burnt rubble two days after the explosions has not yet been made. Police are tight-lipped about the identification process, saying only that the identification process is ongoing.

Back in India, Saini’s family is frantically gathering all the necessary documents to obtain passports to come to Toronto, Saini’s brother Bikramjit Singh said in a phone interview yesterday.
Harinder Takhar, Ontario minister of small business and entrepreneurship, said he had earlier called the Toronto police chief and requested he keep the communication open with the family and allay some of their fears about the identification of the body. Takhar said he is also in touch with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board to work out the procedure for getting the body back to the family and to arrange for compensation.

However, before the body can be released it needs to be officially identified. Toronto’s deputy chief coroner of inquests Dr. Bonita Porter said there are a number of different ways to identify a body.

“The most common is visually, though in some cases that’s not possible,” she said. Fingerprints and dental records are commonly used when a victim’s identity cannot be visually determined by friends or relatives.

There is also DNA analysis. “DNA takes time ... it’s not as fast as it is on television,” Porter said. “It depends on the urgency of the case and certainly the workload at the Centre for Forensic Sciences, which is where our DNA samples are done. It takes weeks to months.” Porter would not comment on the state of the unidentified body found at the Sunrise site or if DNA analysis was being used.