Murder mystery over Germany's 'Rosa the Red'

It's a 90-year-old murder mystery that dates from the turbulent aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I and the birth pangs of social democracy: What happened to Rosa Luxemburg's body?

The communist icon's corpse was buried in a tomb in Berlin where every year thousands of sympathisers have honoured her fight for a workers' paradise.

Or so everyone thought.

It turns out an unidentified body found two years ago in a wooden coffin in a basement room at Berlin's Charite hospital could be Luxemburg's, according to the head of the institution's forensic medicine department.

Michael Tsokos says the body, which is without arms, legs and head, bears "astonishing similarities" to Luxemburg, indicating her last resting place was not, in fact, in a grave at a cemetery in the German capital later vandalised by the Nazis.

But his claims are fiercely disputed, and have generated an intense debate in Germany around the fate of a woman still widely respected on all sides of the political spectrum.

Several thousand people, mainly from Germany's Left Party, again gathered at the memorial to pay tribute to her struggle just ahead of the anniversary of her death.

Luxemburg's life was also the subject of a 1986 film by Margarethe von Trotta which won Barbara Sukowa a best actress award at the Cannes film festival.

Born into a Jewish family in Russian-controlled Poland in 1871, Luxemburg was a philosopher and activist who sought to incite the working classes into the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist regimes.