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U.S.
scientists have elaborated technology that can spot trace amounts of
explosives, drugs or many other substances through fingerprints.
According to chemist R. Graham Cooks of Purdue
University in West
Lafayette, Ind., if a person touched
cocaine, explosives or other materials, there could be enough left in a
fingerprint to identify them.
The progress in forensics comes from combining new
techniques, like those used in the investigation of anthrax, with existing
techniques, like those involved in the Ramsey case, said Max M. Houck, director
of West Virginia University's Forensic Science Initiative.
The FBI said this week that development in genetic research permitted
police to trace the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a certain flask of
spores.
In the killing case of 6-year-old Ramsey in 1996, it was
only this year that prosecutors informed that a new series of tests indicated to
an unknown attacker, clearing family members of suspicion.
Although the testing technique used in Ramsey's case was not
new, as Houck said, prosecutors found out it could be relevant to their case in
a 2007 West Virginia University
course.
According to Cooks, the testing method, discussed in
Friday's edition of the journal Science, could be available in a year or two,
as quoted by the Associated Press.
He explained that substances like cocaine and military
explosives have the tendency to be hard to get off the fingers. If someone who
has manipulated them later handles something hard like a file or plastic
binder, it will transfer the chemicals, he said.
The chemicals are found at the points of the fingerprint's
ridges, so what is then on the hard surface is the fingerprint in chemical. Thus,
police can not only identify the individual from the print, but also link the
person and the drug or chemical, Cooks concluded.
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