FOR more than 40 years, her body lay undiscovered underneath a disused coal cellar.

But after a tip-off last year, police discovered a skeleton buried beneath the concrete floor of a terraced house in the Notting Hill area of London.

Detectives yesterday revealed that the remains were those of Bridget Logan McHugh, a Scotswoman who had been living in London when she disappeared in the early 1960s.

Detectives investigating Mrs McHugh's murder issued a fresh appeal yesterday to solve the mystery and said that, although there have been three arrests in connection with the inquiry, no-one has been charged and the circumstances of her death were unclear.

Metropolitan police yesterday formally identified the victim as Mrs McHugh, a mother-of-three who was originally from the Glasgow area, after a post-mortem examination, DNA tests and forensic work to reconstruct the victim's facial features.

Her remains had electrical flex wrapped around the neck and torso but police said the cause of death was still unknown.

She is thought to have been killed in 1961 when she was 27 or 28.

Mrs McHugh had been living in Amhurst Park, in Hackney, east London, with her two young daughters and a son when she vanished.

However, it was not until May 2000 that one of her daughters reported her missing to West Midlands police.

The police in London yesterday appealed to people who lived in the Hackney and Notting Hill areas in 1961 to help them solve the mystery.

Detective Inspector Geoff Baker, of the serious crime group, said: ''Amhurst Park as was has now been redeveloped, currently this site contains a block of flats - Joseph Court.

''I'm asking for anyone who lived in that area in 1961 to get in touch with us. We need to build up a picture of Bridget's life and the circumstances surrounding her death.

''Also we still need people who were living in St Luke's Road in 1961 to come forward.''

Mr Baker added: ''Bridget Logan McHugh would have been around 27 or 28 years old when she was murdered. She was a housewife and mother who left behind her two daughters and a son.

''A family have been without their mother for too long now - I appeal to the public to come forward and help us put together the pieces of the jigsaw surrounding Bridget's death.''

Mrs McHugh had also lived in Northern Ireland before moving to London.

The three-storey terraced property in St Luke's Road was originally a single house but was converted into housing association flats in the 1970s.

A man, in his late 40s, who has lived in the basement flat since 1977, told yesterday of his shock when police dug up the skeleton last year.

The man, who did not wish to be named, said: ''The police came last year and erected a big tent over the cellar.

''I have lived here for all these years and it is shocking to think I was walking past a dead body every day for so long. I still can't believe it happened here.''

Police have arrested and released on bail three people in connection with the inquiry.

A 61-year-old woman was arrested in Manchester on February 27 last year, one week after the skeleton was discovered. A man aged 68 and a 63-year-old woman were arrested in Coventry and Crawley, West Sussex respectively on February 20 this year.

All three were released on bail and are due to return to the police stations where they were arrested on May 20. No-one has been charged.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said yesterday that they were seeking to establish if there was a missing persons report made at the time of Mrs McHugh's disappearance because procedures had changed since the 1960s.

''We will be speaking to the family to see if they reported it then and obviously we will follow it up with whichever forces they claim to have reported it to.

''It is difficult with an archive case such as this because I believe this precedes the setting up of the national missing persons' unit and bureau so the way that missing persons were treated in the 1960s is very different to the way we do it now.

''We didn't have the computers then and so on. The person wasn't found and we didn't have the kind of media appeals we use nowadays so the case was maybe just left on file.''

The spokesman added that the police were unsure when Mrs McHugh left Scotland or how long she had lived in London and said they were following no definite line of inquiry.

Police declined to comment on a newspaper report they had found Mrs McHugh's remains after a former model told them her deceased father had confessed to killing a woman before she (the daughter) was born and burying her in the cellar of their home.