How Dubai Police tracked down suspect in a sexual assault case despite his death

Dubai Police is constantly equipping itself with the latest technologies and state-of-the-art programmes and software to help fight crime.

The force invests in these measures to ensure that the Emirates remains the safest city in the world.

Hanan Al Mulla, one of the UAE’s young scientists and a forensic DNA expert at Dubai Police, says she is wowed by the 3D scanner that was introduced by the Dubai Police to test future applications for crime scenes.

“You put a camera in the middle of the crime scene and scan everything in 3D. It will create a virtual world that looks like a video game. So the idea behind this is that even if the crime scene has been closed and cleaned up, you can actually revisit it over and over again virtually to see details that you might have missed. This is very impressive technology,” she added.

Sharing details on the use of advanced forensic technology to help solve crime, she said there was a cold rape case because the investigation team didn't know who the suspect was.

“By the time the investigation team determined who the suspect was, he turned out to be dead in an accident. Since it was a sexual assault case, we had an unknown semen DNA of the dead suspect. So we looked at the DNA of his brother, and it matched -- brothers have the same male DNA that they share with their father. When the DNA matched, it was confirmed that the dead suspect was the person we were looking for, and the case was closed.”

Hanan revealed that Dubai is the safest city, and the majority of petty crimes are easily solvable.

Talking about one of her most difficult cases, she said four people died in a surveying plane crash a few years back, and the forensic team was tasked with identifying the people onboard the aircraft.

]“We had to do tests for the unknown victim and their families to find the matches. So that's one of the toughest cases that I remember.”

waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com

• Dubai