Chief Minister MK Stalin launched the country’s first forensic DNA profile search tool developed by the State Forensic Sciences Department and handed it over to the state police chief as Tamil Nadu becomes the first state in the country to get its own facility on Sunday. A press release from the State Secretariat said several countries already have such tools in place for help in the effective crackdown of criminal offenses. DNA is one of the 14 departments of the State Forensic Sciences.
The tool will be utilized for profiling victims of human trafficking, tracking criminals from other states, identifying the missing children and unidentified bodies of people who die in natural disasters and history sheeters. Through the facility, the fingerprints from crime scenes and traces found on the victims of sexual assault and murders can be linked to the criminals.
Commenting on how the upgrade in technology will contribute to faster solving of criminal cases, a senior police officer who had worked with the Department of Forensics said “The present system in place in the department takes time to identify and isolate DNA of required samples gathered. The new search tool, with its advanced quantification kits, however, will be able to deliver accurate results in less time, even for the most challenging casework samples.” Even for degraded samples that are unable to provide a complete profile, the tool can provide accurate matches a feature that can be used for former convicts and previous pending cases.
An officer from the CIB-CID wing said that the new search tool will drastically reduce the time needed to separate fingerprints and other evidence samples and produce more precise results. This feature will be most useful when pursuing a case that involves multiple offenders at a time as there can be chances of being misled by overlapping evidence.
