Solving Crime: How a fingerprint and new biometric system helped police crack double murder in 6 hours
Prima facie, it appeared to be a case of a robbery gone wrong, and the police registered a murder case and began their investigation without any lead.
3 min read
The police were groping in the dark until a fingerprint expert found a fingerprint in the murdered couple’s house. (File photo) On December 18 last year, an elderly couple was found dead at their residence in Aurangabad’s Paithan town. The local police found Bhimrao Kharnal, 65, and his wife Shashikala, 60, had been strangled to death and that some of the jewellery owned by the woman was also missing from the house.
Prima facie, it appeared to be a case of a robbery gone wrong, and the police registered a murder case and began their investigation without any lead.
During their probe, residents of the area told the police that the couple did not have enmity with anyone. Moreover, nobody had seen anyone enter the couple’s house, and the area did not have CCTV cameras.
The police were groping in the dark until a fingerprint expert found a fingerprint in the murdered couple’s house. While this procedure is usually followed in all crime cases, this time around the police had a digital database to match it with.
The police used the latest software, the Automated Multi-modal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS), which was launched by the Maharashtra government just months before in May 2022. AMBIS has digital fingerprints and iris scans from crime scenes and of criminals arrested by the police in the past.
Within six hours, the system showed a match for the fingerprint with that of a man called Syed Asif, 27, a local resident who had been booked in a case in the past. Based on the match, the police tracked down Asif and placed him under arrest on charges of murder and robbery.
An officer said Asif told them he had intended to commit robbery and flee but the senior citizens resisted and started shouting for help. Worried he would be caught, Asif allegedly murdered the couple, added the officer.
Though the state police had access to physical fingerprints to match prints taken from other crime scenes, AMBIS had widened the scope and hastened the process. Around the time AMBIS was launched in Maharashtra over six lakh fingerprints from the 1950’s had been digitised by the state police.
An official said AMBIS, which is overseen by the CID, along with the expertise of fingerprint experts have helped them solve several property offences over the past year.
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