new delhi

The conviction of a suspected rapist in an Indian court has sparked controversy over the quality of DNA fingerprinting evidence used in the case.

The defendant, a politically influential Swami Premananda (a spiritual head of a Hindu sect), was arrested on charges of rape and murder. The investigation heard evidence from several alleged victims, but hoped to clinch the case by showing that the defendant was the father of an aborted fetus conceived by a girl who claimed to have been raped by him.

DNA fingerprinting carried out at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad on tissue from the girl's fetus, and on both her and the swami's blood, concluded that the swami and the alleged rape victim were the biological parents of the fetus. But similar tests carried out by the University Diagnostics Limited, at the request of the defendant, gave negative results. Despite these discrepancies, the district court in Pudukkottai (Tamilnadu state) was apparently swayed by CCMB's findings and sentenced the accused to life imprisonment.

Wilson J. Wall, a consultant geneticist at University Diagnostics, says he is “not surprised” that the results were different. Wall questions the validity of the techniques used by the Indian laboratory, and their interpretation. Wall claims that the procedures fell short of the accepted procedures for establishing matches used in both the United States and Europe.

He says that in his view “their PCR [polymerase chain reaction] analysis would have been thrown out of a British court.” Lalji Singh, head of CCMB's Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, denies the allegations, and claims that the centre's analyses were carried out according to established procedures.