The mystery of the identity of the second world war soldier who returned to his native Hungary five weeks ago after 55 years of captivity in Russia appears to have been solved.

Andras Toma - not Andras Tamas, as he was previously thought to be - was reunited with his brother and sister in the small village of Sulyanbokor, eastern Hungary, on Saturday morning.

Only DNA tests will prove they are related, but there seems to be little doubt in the minds of the doctors and military officers who have been caring for him since his return.

"Everyone in the room wept, including me," said Colonel Laszlo Erdos, head of the defence ministry team which has been researching the PoW's past, as Mr Toma, 75, embraced his brother Janos and sister Anna. "He looks exactly like our late father," his sister said.

Mr Toma was then taken to his old school, where he met former classmates. He seemed to recognise places he had not seen for more than 50 years, people at the reunion said.

The visit to the village near the Ukrainian border fitted a key piece to a puzzle which began in the summer when Hungary learned of a soldier who had been held for 50 years in a Russian psychiatric hospital and whose identity was uncertain.

His return, and the investigation by military and medical experts to establish his identity, has since gripped the country.

The latest revelations have come as a blow to the 82 families who had claimed him as their missing relative - about 600,000 Hungarians were taken to the Soviet Union as prisoners during and after the second world war.

Andras Veer, director of the Hungarian national psychiatry and neurology institute, said experts managed to track down the relatives from the old man's fragmented memories.

Captured

"He told us in which village he worked as a blacksmith's apprentice, where he was born and where he went to school, even the name of his teacher," Mr Veer said. That led to a number of tiny villages near the town of Nyiregyhaza, and then to Sulyanbokor, a village of about 40 farmsteads.

"He remembered lots of things, including names, and we also have the documents proving when he disappeared - everything," Janos Toma said.

Janos was only seven, and Anna one, when Mr Toma, then 19, was captured by the Soviet army in the autumn of 1944. He spent his 20th birthday in a prisoner of war camp east of Leningrad, where Soviet medical records first mentioned him, under the name Andras Tamas, in January 1945.

In 1947, as the camp closed, he was transferred to a mental hospital. He had learned only a few Russian words and he barely communicated with the world in the next 53 years.

Sulyanbokor, where he grew up and where his brother and sister still live, is about 10 miles west of Nyiregyhaza, the county capital. It is a flat landscape, part of the "bush-world" as it is known locally - where the word bokor, meaning bush, is added to every farm name. He is believed to have served an apprenticeship as a blacksmith there before being conscripted into the Hungarian army.

He probably took part in the joint German/Hungarian defence of Nyiregyhaza. His father also fought in the war.

Sitting in a doctor's room at the institute of psychiatry in Budapest, which has been his home since he returned to Hungary, Mr Toma seemed both lost in his memories and alert to what was going on around him.

He spoke all the time, prompted by Col Erdos, who acts as his "interpreter". He has no teeth - new ones are being fitted this week - and his pronunciation of often old-fashioned Hungarian, dotted with occasional Russian, is hard to follow.

Researchers were led to the "bush-world" near Nyiregyhaza by Mr Toma himself. He began to mention the names of places and relatives. As I sat with him, Col Erdos gave him a gift of palinka - Hungarian plum brandy - distilled close

to where he was born. Mr Toma sniffed the bottle approvingly. "Not like that foreign stuff you tried on me the other day," he joked - he speaks so much of alcohol his carers offered him a small glass of whisky last week.

Amid the flood of his memories it is almost impossible to direct his line of thought. He speaks one moment of a church, then of taking part in the construction of a building, the next moment of the roar of cannon during battle. And, increasing the problems confronting researchers, he refuses to write anything down, and shows no sense of time in his recollections. The church could have

been one of the Protestant establishments which dot the landscape of eastern Hungary - most Hungarians are Catholic.

His knowledge of certain types of military equipment led researchers to believe he had been in an artillery regiment. When he was presented with a Hungarian private soldier's cap - on loan from the museum of war history in Budapest - he tried it on many times, then said: "This isn't mine - the insignia is missing." But no amount of persuasion could get him to describe the insignia, which would have helped to discover his former regiment.

There have been many lighter moments for those who have sat with him for the past weeks. When he was told that he was going to be shown films about the second world war, he moved his chair to the very back of the room - only to be disappointed by his first encounter with television and its tiny images.

When he speaks of money, it is about the pre-war Hungarian currency, the pengo. He often mentions a "five pengo photograph", perhaps one taken of him in his new uniform before he was taken off to fight. He also frequently mentions scenes connected with his work as a blacksmith, shoeing the cavalry officers' horses.

Now that his identity is almost certain, the remaining missing pieces of his past should be easier to find.

Janos, a retired farmer, is cautious: "We're sure he is ours, but we're not saying any more until the tests prove it." That could take two weeks.

Many of the wartime Hungarian prisoners were civilians, rounded up on the streets by the conquering Russian army and transported east in cattle-trucks to rebuild the Soviet Union. One in three of them died of cold, disease, and malnutrition.

The last mass returns took place in 1954. By then Mr Toma was hidden from sight in the mental hospital in Kotelnich, 600 miles east of Moscow, from which he has only now emerged.