Putting a finger(print) on it

On September 9 last year, India woke up to the horrific news of a 34-year-old woman being raped and murdered in Mumbai’s Sakinaka area. Within 24 hours, the Mumbai Police arrested an accused, identified as Mohan Chauhan and within 18 days, filed a chargesheet against him in a fast-track court.

While these details of the crime are now common knowledge, there is one aspect of the case known only to a select few. A crucial part of that 346- page chargesheet is a report submitted by the Mumbai Fingerprint Bureau, which states that fingerprints lifted from the spot are an identical match to Chauhan’s fingerprints.

The alleged rape and murder occurred in a parked truck. A team of fingerprint experts went over every inch of the truck, dusting it with chemical powder and taking photographs of any fingerprint found on any of its surfaces.

After Chauhan was arrested, his fingerprints matched with the ones taken from the truck, becoming a concrete piece of evidence in the case.

Established in 1899 under the British rule, the Fingerprint Bureau has been quietly working behind the scenes, providing the required support for scores of detections and convictions.

The Bureau in Mumbai is housed in a nondescript building near the MRA Marg police station, where a room full of technicians work patiently and doggedly at their screens, processing information and requests from police stations, crime branch units and other offices all over Mumbai.

Officers are posted at the Bureau directly from the Maharashtra Police Training Academy, and have to undergo a one-year training course before they can start working. All Fingerprint Bureau personnel are required to appear for an exam three years after their recruitment. It is only after they pass this exam that they are qualified to submit their analysis and opinion as evidence in court cases. In other words, unless they pass this exam, their opinion isn’t counted as expert opinion and has no value in a court.

“We have a database of over 2.5 lakh fingerprints in Mumbai alone, while all units in Maharashtra would hold around seven lakh fingerprints. After every arrest, the police station or unit concerned sends us the fingerprints of the accused. This is also done for convicts, whose prints are collected by our personnel posted at all prisons in the state. Further, we collect hundreds of prints from crime scenes, which are called chance prints,” Sanjay Rawal, Director of the Mumbai Fingerprint Bureau, explains.

Fingerprinting as a piece of evidence works on the simple principle that no two fingerprints are identical. Faces can be changed, eye colours and voices can be altered, even skin tones can be tweaked, but fingerprints are always constant and unique to their owners. Hence, they become very important as evidence in a court of law, and help the investigating officers establish the identity of the accused as well as their presence at the crime scene beyond doubt.

Police Inspector Vijay Bhilare, who is currently posted with the Mumbai Fingerprint Bureau, recalls a crime that occurred in Wardha. An argument during a marriage celebration led to the accused stabbing the victim to death right outside the venue. After the crime, the accused placed the dagger in a plastic bag and threw it in a garbage dump, from where it was subsequently recovered. The Fingerprint Bureau lifted a print off the dagger, matched it to the arrested accused and submitted it as evidence. As Bhilare was the officer who had submitted the expert opinion, he was called to testify during the trial.

“During cross-examination, the lawyer asked me how we were able to get such clear prints despite the dagger being wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown in a garbage dump. I replied saying that it was precisely because of the plastic that the fingerprints had been preserved, as the plastic had protected the dagger from the elements,” Bhilare recounts.

Clearly, the Fingerprint Bureau’s work is not just limited to squinting at computer screens and typing out reports. They, too, need to play legal games with lawyers in court.

The job, Bureau personnel say, is as rewarding as it is challenging. In September 2018, Siddharth Sanghvi, a vice president with a leading private bank, was murdered in the parking lot of his office building in Lower Parel. Sarfaraz Sheikh was one of the many suspects picked up by the police, but getting concrete evidence against was a challenge.

Sanghvi’s car, meanwhile, was found abandoned in Navi Mumbai. After hours of painstaking work, the Fingerprint Bureau team found one solitary thumbprint on the handbrake of the car, amidst stains of blood. The photographer, who was quite tall, squeezed himself into a near-impossible position in the back of the car so that he could get that one clear photograph of the print. The effort ultimately paid off. The print matched the prints taken from Sheikh.

In 2019, the Maharashtra government launched the Automated Multimodal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS). While earlier, prints had to be taken and compared manually, with experts poring over each ridge and whorl in the photograph, AMBIS made the entire system digital.

“In 2020, when all our records were digitised, we were able to solve 84 cases in one go. As soon as the prints were entered into the system, AMBIS automatically searched for matches and gave us our suspects. ,” Rawal says.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)