VILLAGERS slept through the early hours of a wet Tuesday morning oblivious to the fact that a team of the country's top forensic specialists were busy exhuming the body of 11 year-old Phyllis Porter from her grave in St Luke's Churchyard.

Police stood guard through the night at all the entrances to the Orrell Parish Church on the outskirts of Wigan.

Shortly before 4am a generator was started up in the neat, elevated cemetery, which runs alongside Lodge Road to power floodlights so experts, some in green others in white protective overalls, could start their grim task.

Shielded from view by a canvas tent, a team of green suited workmen from the specialist firm UK Exhumations began digging at the burial plot 20 yards to the east of the 19th century church. The decision was made to unearth the grave by spadework, since there was not enough room to accommodate a mechanical digger.

Every action was carefully monitored by highly experienced crime scene examiners and even the undertaker who buried Phyllis in that same spot more than six years ago was present to verify it was the original coffin.

The man leading the police investigation, Det Chief Inspector Tony Cook, stood by, along with coroner Jennifer Leeming, an exhibits officer and a representative from the Forensic Science Service. A solicitor representing the Porter family was also present.

Reporters and cameramen watched from the vantage point of a stone wall on the edge of Orrell Water Park, occasionally getting a view of the exhumation team silhouetted in the churchyard about 100 yards from the main road.

The two and a quarter hour dig was interspersed by the occasional light shower, the fleeting glimpse of a pipistrelle bat and then the hum of the generator was drowned at 5am by a dawn chorus of birdsong.

At 6.15 pm the first stage in the resumption of the inquiry into Phyllis Porter's mysterious death was over. Vehicles emerged from the churchyard and her coffin, transported by a white Ford Transit van bearing only a small sticker declaring "Motorway Maintenance" on the left hand rear door, was taken to the mortuary at Wigan Infirmary for forensic tests.

Police continued to guard the churchyard throughout the morning, preventing the public from entering.

DCI Cook said after the exhumation: "It has gone as well as can be expected. The purpose was to bring the remains out of the ground so we could conduct a second post mortem examination. We are looking to do a re-examination."

He said the results of scientific tests would be known within three or four weeks.