Rape and murder victims
Australian police will re-examine 7,000 crimes solved through DNA evidence after a mistake forced detectives to free a suspect wrongly accused of murder.
Police in the southern city of Melbourne withdrew charges against Russell John Gesah, accused in July of the 1984 murders of a 35-year-old mother and her nine-year-old daughter.
“It’s obviously an embarrassment and we would rather not be in this position,” said Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland…
Police last month said a DNA sample taken from the murder scene, where Margaret Tapp was strangled and her daughter Seana raped and later killed, matched Gesah after comparison with 400,000 other DNA profiles on a national database.
Gesah was arrested and faced court, but a later check found the DNA evidence used against him was taken elsewhere and mistakenly tested with samples from the Tapp murder scene.
Overland said every crime solved by DNA in the state since the testing [...]
The Child of the Child King?
Tagged Under : dna test
DNA tests to study mummy fetuses in King Tut tomb
Egyptian scientists are carrying out DNA tests on two mummified fetuses found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun to determine whether they are the young pharaoh’s offspring, the antiquities authority said Wednesday.
The two tiny female fetuses, between five to seven months in gestational age, were found in King Tut’s tomb in Luxor when it was dissevered in 1922. DNA samples from the fetuses “will be compared to each other, along with those of the mummy of King Tutankhamun,” the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, said in a statement.
The testing is part of a wider program to check the DNA of hundreds of mummies to determine their identities and family relations. Hawass said the program could help determine Tutankhamun’s family lineage, which has long been a source of mystery among Egyptologists. The identity of Tut’s parents is [...]
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Scientists will conduct DNA tests on two tiny mummified bodies found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun to determine whether they were the young pharaoh’s offspring, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said Wednesday.
There has been no archaeological evidence that King Tut, who died around the age of 19 under mysterious circumstances more than 3,000 years ago, left any offspring. But mummies found in his tomb contained the bodies of two females born prematurely between five to seven months gestation who may be his stillborn children, said Zahi Hawass, head of the antiquities authority.
The DNA tests will also seek to establish Tutankhamun’s family lineage, a mystery among many Egyptologists.
“All of these results will be compared to each other, along with those of the mummy of King Tutankhamun,” Hawass said in a statement.
Tutankhamun was one of the last kings of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. Scholars believe that at age 12, he married his [...]
