  The consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator for mixtures of
elliptically-symmetric distributions for estimating its population version is
shown, where the underlying distribution $P$ is nonparametric and does not
necessarily belong to the class of mixtures on which the estimator is based. In
a situation where $P$ is a mixture of well enough separated but nonparametric
distributions it is shown that the components of the population version of the
estimator correspond to the well separated components of $P$. This provides
some theoretical justification for the use of such estimators for cluster
analysis in case that $P$ has well separated subpopulations even if these
subpopulations differ from what the mixture model assumes.
