SASCHA MEISSMER, a German businessman, and his Thai wife, Patchara, were in their beachside restaurant near the popular tourist resort of Khao Lak when the tsunami hit a year ago this month.

Mrs Meissmer was holding her four-year-old daugher, Solitaire, in her lap. They were dragged more than 100 metres out to sea, and Solitaire was wrenched from her grasp.

The couple have not seen their daughter since. But they never entirely gave up hope, because in the dreadful days after the disaster several people claimed to have seen Solitaire at the emergency centre in nearby Phuket.

Now, just conceivably, they have found her — but they must wait a few more agonising days before they know for sure.

This week a friend of Mr Meissmer in Germany spotted the photograph of a Eurasian-looking girl on a tsunami website. The girl has tousled brown hair and wears a green T-shirt decorated with cartoon characters. She is sitting in the Phuket administration office at some date after the Boxing Day disaster. A woman who appears to be a European volunteer is holding her hand, possibly trying to discover what language she speaks.

The Meissmers say they are certain the girl is Solitaire. “We are a million per cent sure that the girl in this picture is our daughter,” Mrs Meissmer said.But convincing the Thai authorities of that is a different matter. Their problem is that the girl has been placed with another family who claimed her. They acknowledge the Meissmers’ suituation “must be unbearable”, but have begged them to be patient and warned them that the girl may very well be someone else.

As a first step officials are attempting to trace the two workers who appear in the photograph to ask if she gave her name or knew the whereabouts of her parents. But they may eventually have to resort to DNA testing.

Herr Meissmer, 36, who is from Frankfurt but has lived in southern Thailand for eight years, recalled yesterday how he and his wife — after her release from hospital — had searched frantically for their daughter.

“Nobody believed Solitaire could still be alive and nobody helped us. Even friends said they didn’t believe our daughter had survived,” he said. “But everything was possible that day. It was the craziest day of my life. I was standing about a hundred metres from the water and didn’t even get wet.”

After their fruitless search the couple could not bear to remain near the scene of their loss, so moved to Phuket. Maybe they have lived for a year a few miles from their daughter.

The Meissmers have scheduled a meeting with officials on Tuesday to try to resolve the case.

“I hope and pray to get my daughter back as a Christmas present,” Mrs Meissmer said yesterday. “We never gave up searching for her because several people saw her still alive one week after the tsunami.”

There can be no entirely happy ending to this story, even if the girl does turn out to be Solitaire. As one official put it: “If they are reunited, then their joy will be tempered by the fact that another family who have thought of this little girl as their own for the past year will be devastated.”

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