Crime knows no borders, thought the founders of Interpol a hundred years ago. In fighting it, sharing knowledge and information between countries is indispensable. In this series, colleagues talk about the importance of international police cooperation. Today Izanne de Wit and Wendy van Hilst of the National Personal Missing Persons Expertise Centre (LOEP) on the I-Familia DNA database. ‘If all countries work in the same way, we can bring people back home.’
Redactie PEN-MP
Hope in the form of a cotton swab. Thirty-one families from the Dutch formely island of Urk hope that donating a bit of cheek swab will one day give them answers about their fathers, brothers, uncles or cousins who went missing at sea. That chance has increased thanks to I-Familia, a new DNA database from Interpol. It allows the DNA profiles of relatives of long-term missing persons to be matched with the Interpol database for missing persons worldwide at lightning speed.
Genetic hit
How exactly does it work? Police forces collect DNA not only from long-term missing persons, but also from their relatives. Those profiles of relatives are all stored in I-Familia according to the same technical specifications. Then smart software* [see box Bonaparte] compares these coded data with the thousands of profiles in the global Interpol database for missing persons.
Do the data from both databases (partially) match? Then the computer programme calculates the probability of a genetic hit. ‘This technique is crucial to the success of I-Familia; no matches without this software,’ LOEP team leader and PEN-MP president Izanne de Wit stresses.
Fishing net
Where until recently countries had to ‘fish’ one-on-one for possible links between missing persons and unknown deaths, I-Familia gives them a large, even global fishing net. That is what LOEP decided to deploy in the search for Urk’s 31 missing fishermen. With one practical problem, outlines forensic coordinator Wendy van Hilst: ‘When DNA was taken in 2015, relatives gave their consent for their DNA to be included in the Dutch database for missing persons. So we had to approach all those relatives again.’
‘Your DNA goes into an international database in Lyon, which is quite a lot,’ she realises. ‘We therefore also made it clear in our information that this DNA is used under strict conditions. And only for tracing missing persons, not for criminal cases.’
De Wit saw once again how much missing persons affect the close-knit community, even today. ‘A “number at Interpol” corresponds to whole family histories. The missing persons are common threads through many lives. And then it doesn’t matter whether it’s a few years or 50 years ago, even after all these years, it’s quite emotional.’
A “number at Interpol” corresponds to whole family histories
Izanne de Wit
Perseverance
From the United Kingdom to Croatia and from Belgium to Brazil, I-Familia can provide links in many searches. Van Hilst: ‘Dutch people go missing abroad and vice versa. That makes us dependent on each other. Unfortunately, the database is only filling up slowly. Before all profiles from 195 countries are in it, will be a while.’
National laws, in fact, are far from allowing countries to share their DNA profiles internationally. But the potential is great and each new profile increases the hope of a match. Van Hilst: ‘Once the profiles are in both databases, you have the results within 15 minutes.’
For example, international DNA kinship searches can lead to breakthroughs in dozens, if not hundreds, of cold cases, De Wit outlines. ‘If countries all work the same way, we can bring people back home or revive murder investigations.’
De Wit and Van Hilst saw in Urk why that persistence pays off. ‘When someone at the grave grabs your hand and says “thank you for bringing my husband back after 60 years” – that’s all we need.’
The Netherlands Forensic Institute developed Bonaparte, special software to enable large-scale DNA identification. It donated the computer programme to Interpol. It forms the link between the I-Familia database of family DNA profiles and the international database for missing persons. Even in the start-up phase of I-Familia, the database already achieved its first success. In late 2020, Interpol made a match between a body found by Croatian police in the Adriatic Sea in 2004 and the Missing Persons case of an Italian man.