Cairo: Workers digging a big waterway in the Suez Canal area recently unearthed a skeleton of an Egyptian soldier who went missing in the country’s 1973 war against Israel.

The discovery sparked a tug-of-war between two families with each claiming that the skeletal remains.

The workers, who stumbled on the skeleton earlier this month, said they had found along with it a flask, a military boot and an army ID tag.

The dead soldier was identified as Mohammad Hassan Attwa.

Both families, living in the northern Delta provinces of Dakahlia and Sharqia respectively, say a family member bearing the same name went missing around the same time.

“All the things found along with the body confirm that it belongs to my father,” Eman, a 42-year-old daughter of one of the two missing soldiers, said. “Therefore, I request the Armed Forces to hand over the remains of my father to us to bury them in the family’s tomb,” she told a local TV station.

When reminded that another family makes the same claim, Eman, who was hardly two years old when her father disappeared, called for doing a DNA test on the skeleton to determine its identity.

A military spokesman, meanwhile, said that examinations, based on the ID found with the unearthed skeleton, showed it belonged to a soldier named Mohammad Hassan Attwa, who was born in Sharqia in 1954. “He went missing on October 18, 1973 and was officially listed a martyr on October 18, 1973,” state media quoted the army’s spokesman Brigadier Mohammad Samir, as saying on Wednesday. He added that a military funeral was held this week in honour of the dead soldier before his remains were buried in the army’s cemetery.

Glad over the news, the Sharqia family said it would ask President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi to order the remains be exhumed for re-burial in the family’s graveyard.

“Although I did not see my father, I am proud because he sacrificed his life for defending the country, its honour and dignity,” Salah, who was born few months before his father’s death, told semi-official newspaper Al Akhbar. “I want officials to honour my father’s memory by naming a school or a street in our village after him.”

Earlier this month, Al Sissi launched the building of a 72km waterway parallel to the existing Suez Canal as part of a larger project designed to establish Egypt as a global trade and industrial hub.