Saddam's DNA
Testing was done in military lab; US keeping results close to chest | By Robert Walgate
DNA testing was a key tool used by US authorities to ensure the man they found in a hole in the ground last week was indeed Saddam Hussein, together with confirmation by former members of Saddam's regime. But details of those tests are unlikely to be revealed soon. Officials from the US Department of Defense have indicated to The Scientist that next week would be the earliest any publication of the results and methods would happen, if they are made public at all. What has been confirmed is that the testing was carried out at the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) in Washington, DC. The lab is a department of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Officials from the institute told The Scientist that the lab had already done a considerable amount of DNA work on operational cases in Iraq and therefore had real expertise in the identification of Saddam. Meanwhile, speculation on the methodology and quality of the data is running rife. News of the result seems first to have been first broken by the head of the Iraqi Governing Council Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, who said on Sunday that DNA tests had confirmed that the suspect was Saddam Hussein, less than 24 hours after his discovery. Allowing for the time taken to fly a sample from the captured man to Washington, this implies the test was completed very quickly for a routine DNA identification—unless initial tests were performed in Iraq. But the job could be done in less than 24 hours with computer-assisted gel electrophoresis, if the comparison sample was known to be Saddam's and if a laboratory was dedicated to the task, said David Hartshorne, commercial director of Cellmark. Cellmark is the UK company that in 1987 pioneered the introduction of DNA technology into forensics and relationship testing. Routine tests would not be done so quickly, but “After all, this is the most high profile case in the world,” Hartshorne told The Scientist. As for speed compromising accuracy, “If you are doing a full STR [short tandem repeat] profile, it's no less accurate than if you'd taken 3 days to do the same thing.” David Goldstein of University College London also told The Scientist: “DNA evidence could easily be used without their having had a prior sample from Saddam Hussein himself. They may have had DNA samples of relatives; if nothing else, they presumably have DNA samples from his sons.” If the lab doing the testing had developed a plan of how they would use the information from these relatives, or an earlier sample from Saddam himself, they could do the tests on the new sample from Saddam very quickly indeed, said Goldstein. “If properly motivated, they could turn such a test around in a single working day, so 24 hours poses no problem at all.” As for the comparison sample, General Tommy Franks, chairman of the 25-nation US Central Command, said on CNN in April that “of course” the coalition had DNA samples from Saddam. According to Hartshorne, the sources speculated about in the media—cigarette butts, razor blades, and cups from his former dwellings—would be sufficient. In the April CNN report, Franks also added, “The appropriate people with the appropriate forensics are doing checks you would find appropriate in each of the places where we think we may have killed regime leadership.” AFDIL should thus have samples from Saddam's dead sons, Uday and Qusay, which would provide autosomal and Y-chromosome comparisons, and from Saddam's captured maternal half-brother Watban Ibrahim Hassan, offering autosomal and mtDNA comparisons.
|
