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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Phantom cotton swab killer evaporates 

German tabloid Bild reports an international police investigation with an outcome worthy of Internal Security's Department of Unspecified Threat Assessment:
Police in Germany hunted a sinister phantom killer for two years after finding the same DNA at 39 different crime scenes - only to discover that the source was a woman who made the cotton buds used to collect the sample! [...]

Police linked the 'killer' to seven murders. [...] As part of the investigation, 800 previously convicted women were questioned - but there was no match to the sample. Her DNA was found over and over again: in bottles, tank lids, on bullets – and once even on a biscuit! Traces were found in southern Germany, Austria and France. Thousands of saliva tests were taken but there was still no answer.

In April 2008, detectives ran out of ideas, so an internal inquiry was launched. And yesterday Bernd Meiners, a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Saarbrucken, revealed: “There are considerable doubts about the existence of the ‘phantom killer’. The DNA has instead been linked to investigation materials.” An employee at the cotton bud manufacturer has apparently been pretty careless!

According to reports, the maker of the buds is a company in Hamburg, with branches in Baden-Wurttemberg and the Saarland as well as Austria and France. The company has been supplying the police investigators with cotton buds since 2001.
Posted by: Allen Varney / 4:06 PM

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