Criminals who have left forensic traces at serious crime scenes but cannot be found on the national DNA database are being targeted in an initiative encouraging police to identify offenders through their relatives.
Some 40,000 "crime scene DNA profiles" on the National DNA database cannot be matched to any of the more than three million individual profiles it contains,
A recent Home Office "e-bulletin" to police advises them to examine DNA profiles on the database that bear similarities to the genetic "fingerprint" found at the crime scene and which may belong to relatives of the unidentified criminal, the assumption being that "criminality tends to run in families.
" One of the most notable uses of the technique came two years ago when a teenager, Craig Harman, who killed a lorry driver when he threw a brick off a motorway bridge, was jailed after being tracked down through a relative's DNA.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1522307/Relatives-to-be-targeted-if-DNA-draws-a-blank.html
