He was the intrepid war photographer, whose swashbuckling style and good looks gained him fame around the world before his untimely disappearance while on assignment. And now the decades-old mystery about the fate of Sean Flynn, son of the Hollywood legend Errol Flynn, may be solved by DNA tests.

Forensic scientists will analyse a jawbone and a femur dug up from a suspected mass grave in the central Kampong Cham province of Cambodia, where Flynn went missing in 1970. The remains were recovered by two British adventurers who said that a villager claimed he witnessed Khmer Rouge soldiers executing a prisoner matching Flynn’s description at the spot in 1971. The US Embassy in Phnom Penh has sent the remains to the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which identifies missing Americans from past wars.

The discovery was made by “bone hunters” Keith Rotheram, 60, a Briton who owns a guesthouse in Sihanoukville, and David MacMillan, 29, a Scottish-born Australian.

John Johnson, a US embassy spokesman, said: “Obviously there is nothing conclusive. Each case is different so it is difficult to speculate on how long the analysis may take.”

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