Woman in a cold Spanish case identified after 20 years as Liudmila Zavada

Valdecy Urquiza, secretary general of the International Police Agency Interpol, which leads the campaign, said that the latest identification would give “new hope to the families and friends of the missing people” and “new tracks” to investigators.

“After 20 years, an unknown woman was made her name,” he said.

Ms. Zavada’s body was discovered in July 2005 next to a road in the province of Barcelona in northeast Spain.

She was called by the police as “the pink woman” because she was dressed in a pink flower top, pink pants and pink shoes.

Local police said the cause of death was “suspicious” because evidence suggested that the body had been moved within 12 hours of its discovery.

But the surveys failed to discover his identity.

Last year, the case was added to the Operation Identity Me, which saw for the first time the “black opinion” – looking for information on unidentified bodies – released to the public, and files such as fingerprints shared with police forces around the world.

Earlier this year, Turkish police directed fingerprints in a national database, discovering the identity of Ms. Zavada.

A DNA match was then established with a close relative in Russia.

Police surveys on the death of Mrs. Zavada and the circumstances surrounding him continue.

The first woman identified by the campaign was Rita Roberts, 31, from Wales, who was murdered in Belgium in 1992. Her family said she had been worried for decades, not knowing what had happened to her.

Earlier this year, a woman found dead in a poultry shed in Spain was identified as Ainoha Izaga Ibieta Lima, 33, from Paraguay to South America. The circumstances surrounding his death were described by the police as “unexplained”.

Police are still trying to find the identity of 44 other women found dead in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. The majority of them are victims of murder, supposed to be aged 15 to 30.

Interpol said that the increase in global migration and human trafficking has led more people to have disappeared outside their country, which can make the identification organs more difficult.

An agency official told BBC that women were “affected disproportionately by sexist violence, including domestic violence, sexual assault and trafficking”.