The remains of the so-called ‘baby in the post’ have been exhumed close to sixty years after his body was sent to the Darwin Post Office, the media has reported.

In an NT Police statement on Wednesday Detective Superintendent Jon Beer said the Cold Case Taskforce was exhuming human skeletal remains from the Jingili cemetery after advancements in DNA technology “opened further avenues of inquiry”.

But he said for the privacy of everyone involved, and due to the nature of the investigations, “no further commentary on the individual case can be provided”.

However the NT News reported Cold Case Taskforce Detective Senior Constable Glen Chatto said the case had “been on the radar since 1965, so it’s been an ongoing investigation since then”, and the paper said the remains being exhumed were those of a baby sent in the post to Darwin in that year, the so-called ‘baby in the post’.

In 1965, the decomposing naked body of a baby with his umbilical cord still attached, and a stocking wrapped around his neck, was found by Darwin Post Office staff after they noticed a bad smell coming from a parcel.

The parcel had been sent from Russell St in Melbourne on May 3, to addressee “J Anderson”, at the old post office in Knuckey St, with the fake return address of JF Barnes, 2 Woolridge Ave, Mentone, Victoria.

The NT News reported that earlier this year a request to exhume the body was rejected by NT deputy coroner Kelvin Currie because he believed there were not sufficient reasons for it to be “necessary for an investigation”.

But, the paper wrote, a coroner later ordered the body be dug up for testing. In June News Corp reported Amelia Anderson came to them, offering to supply DNA samples, after hearing about the case in the True Crime Australia podcast The Missing.

She said she believed J Anderson was her father Jimmy Anderson, who was a member of the AFLNT Team of the Century.

In the podcast, the police officer who was sent to the post office to investigate, former Detective Denver Marchant, said he believed J Anderson was a well known NT sportsman in the Northern Territory.

The paper reported that Snr Cons Chatto said the body would be kept at the morgue until a DNA match was made, and that he said the case was “one of many that we’re working on”, with 64 unidentified skeletal remains in the Northern Territory.

NT Police did not respond to a request from the NT Independent to confirm the remains being dug up were the remainsof the baby sent in the post in 1965.