LYON: Interpol has announced the identification of a woman known only as “The Woman in Pink” after her body was discovered in Spain two decades ago.
This case marks the latest success for the international police organisation’s “Identify Me” cold case campaign, which launched in 2023 to identify women found dead under suspicious circumstances across Europe.
The woman has been identified as Liudmila Zavada, a Russian national, according to Interpol’s official statement.
Her body was discovered in 2005 near a road in Viladecans, Spain, close to Barcelona, wearing a distinctive pink floral top, pink trousers, and pink shoes, with investigators determining she had been dead for less than twenty-four hours.
Spanish police believed the body had been moved within the twelve hours prior to its discovery, strongly suggesting foul play was involved in her death.
Despite extensive investigations at the time, her true identity remained a complete mystery for nearly twenty years.
Spanish authorities submitted the case to the Identify Me campaign last year after exhausting all traditional investigative leads without success.
A crucial breakthrough occurred this year when Turkish police ran the woman’s fingerprints through their national biometric database, producing a match for Zavada, who was thirty-one years old at the time of her death.
The fingerprint match was later definitively confirmed through kinship DNA analysis using a sample provided by one of Zavada’s close relatives.
Interpol Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza stated, “After 20 years, an unknown woman has been given back her name.”
This successful identification represents the third major breakthrough achieved by the Identify Me appeal since its inception.
The campaign led to the 2023 identification of Rita Roberts, a British woman murdered in Antwerp in 1992, after relatives recognised her distinctive tattoo in publicity materials.
Earlier this year, the campaign also identified 33-year-old Ainoha Izaga Ibieta Lima when Paraguayan authorities matched fingerprints uploaded by Spain against their national databases.
The Identify Me campaign continues its work, currently focusing on solving forty-four remaining cases of unidentified women across Europe. – AFP
