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Germany's federal criminal office is to introduce a central DNA database for sex offenders, convicted murderers and others who commit serious crimes, including members of house-breaking rings. The minister of the interior, Manfred Kanther, approved the plan last week.

The move follows a series of largely unsolved sex killings of children in the past few months in Germany. Political pressure to introduce a DNA database grew particularly strong after the most recent case, the murder of a 13-year-old girl in Lower Saxony last month.

Rapid advances in DNA analysis and bioinformatics have made DNA databases invaluable to forensic scientists. Such databases are already used in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Austria, and pressure is growing for similar moves in France (see Nature 392, 430; 1998). But Germany has held back until now, mainly because of concern about privacy and data protection issues.

Police in Germany already use genetic fingerprinting based on samples of hair, tissue, saliva or sperm found on the bodies or clothes of victims. But they have not had the opportunity to compare the genetic profile of such samples with data held in a central DNA database.

In the case of the recent Lower Saxony murder, police had to request saliva samples from all the 18,000 men between the ages of 18 and 30 in the region in which they believe the murderer lives to allow a comparison with the murderer's genetic fingerprint.

The samples are being analysed in police laboratories in Hanover. The procedure has been criticized for its high costs and relatively low likelihood of success, as donations are voluntary and the police are relying more on being able to rule out individuals than on identifying the murderer directly.

“Germany can no longer afford to do without an instrument that has proved an efficient criminological tool,” says Detlef Dauke, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior.

The DNA database will be built up gradually. According to Dauke, the technical equipment is already available at the federal criminal office. Germany's 16 Länder (states), which are responsible for policing, will start to transmit existing DNA data immediately.

It remains to be decided for which crimes compulsory production of a DNA sample will be required and for how long samples will be stored. And it is still unclear whether the operation of the database will need to be backed by new legislation, if its data are to be acceptable as legal evidence in a trial.

But there is a broad consensus that the database will help to speed the rate at which serious crimes are solved, and will help to lead to the immediate ruling out of innocent suspects.