The Central Bureau of Investigation, which has taken charge of the Nithari serial murders probe amid a swirl of political controversy, has pressed into service its most skilled forensic scientists and is considering taking advice from international experts as well. Agency officials told The Sunday Express today that they will examine some of the “landmark psychopathic crimes” across the world and might seek the help of investigators of those cases.There is enough reason to. For, the Nithari case — given the number of skeletons, bone fragments found — is turning out to be one of the toughest forensic challenges the CBI has faced. Officials admit that this is despite the fact that the agency has had recent successes: cracking the post-Gujarat cases via forensic evidence and DNA samples from bodies dug from mass graves first in Dahod (the Bilkis Banoo case) and last year in Lunawada (the Amina Habib Rasool case).But the Nithari case is more complicated, say top CBI officials who visited the suspected crime scene this week. For instance, while the CBI has with it 19 cases registered by the UP police, the actual number of victims is “indeterminate’’ given the hundreds of bone fragments and skulls which have been exhumed from the drains and surrounding areas of the horror house where businessman Moninder Singh Pandher lived. Also, officials say, while in the Bilkis case, entire decomposed bodies were piled up in the mass grave, in this case, the bodies had been mutilated and only bone fragments have been found. The “quality” of the evidence and of the DNA samples will also be more difficult to decode since the alleged murders occurred over a two-year period. Still, CBI officials say they have “much, much more’’ evidence than had been handed over to them by the UP police: additional bone fragments, items of clothing, fingerprints and bloodstains recovered from and around the scene of the crime. Experts point out that this appears to be a unique case of serial killings since most serial killers are known to dump bodies in different, distant locations while in this case, all the bodies had been disposed of in nearby drains and bylanes.CBI officials say that within a few days they will commence two significant procedures in the Nithari case. While the head of the Forensic Department at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) will oversee the DNA tests, the “individualization’’ or reconstruction of the skeletal remains will take place in the Anatomy Department of AIIMS.Simultaneously, the CBI will shortly commence collecting blood samples from relatives of the 19 victims for whose disappearance police cases have been registered. “But we will cast our net much wider,’’ an official said. “The number of samples will be very large for we are hoping more people whose children have disappeared and have not filed police cases will now come forward to assist the investigation.’’The identity of the victims will then be established by matching the DNA samples of the parents of the victims with the DNA on the bone fragments. The CBI will also enlist the services of dental experts in the case since several skulls have been recovered and dental remains are known to provide very good quality DNA samples.While the CBI appears to be confronted with an enormous body of forensic evidence, in the past the agency has cracked crimes via DNA sampling on mere shreds of evidence. In the Madhumita Shukla murder case, for example, the clinching DNA samples were recovered from the undergarments of the deceased and in the Geeta Chopra and Sanjay Chopra murder case, the killers were identified through a fragment of a fingerprint found on the car used for the abduction.
