The boss of the Criminal Brigade, Michel Faury, pleads to keep the unknown DNA fingerprints longer in the files, until the date of prescription of the crimes, in an interview with the JDD.
For the most serious crimes, fingerprints are kept for 25 years in the Automated Fingerprint File (Faed) and 40 years in the National Automated DNA File (Fnaeg).
“Four decades before removing a trace, that may seem like a lot. But that is not always enough. Hence our proposal to wedge the removal of all traces, in an unresolved case, on the limitation date”, indicated Michel Faury, adding that “in this way, the Fnaeg would be consistent with the prescription rules of the police investigation”.
A proposal that appears in an administrative report, according to the weekly.
According to him, “this reform would be useful not for the mass of the businesses, but for the small number of mysterious crimes on which we have no elements of investigation”, that is to say about thirty crimes.
“In general, there remain one to two cases per year, cold cases, which join the sixty or so cases handled in particular by the Criminal and Behavioral Analysis Unit for Complex Cases (UAC3)”, he said. for follow-up.
“What a shame to cut off your wings by removing too quickly from the file unknown traces or the fingerprints of people who have acted very young and who risk reoffending”, assures Michel Faury.
To support his argument, the boss of the criminal squad takes the example of François Vérove, a former policeman and gendarme, identified as the “Hail”, a killer and serial rapist wanted since the 1980s and suspected of five crimes committed between 1986 and 1994.
His DNA turned out to match the genetic profile found at several crime scenes, explained the Paris prosecutor’s office.
“The DNA trace found at crime scenes in 1986 was not integrated into the Fnaeg until 2000, two years after the creation of this file. It could therefore not be deleted before 2040, which gave us But if the file had existed as early as 1986 and if it had been integrated immediately, as is the case today, the deadline would have been 2026 “, commented the head of the criminal brigade.