The Police corps has no capability of undertaking scientific investigations following the split in the forensic laboratory in 2001, Forensic Laboratory director Anthony Abela Medici told The Malta Independent.
Subsequently, capabilities of the Police Forensic Laboratory were severely impaired and results on specific cases involved in police investigations could no longer be immediately available to investigating officers. While police forces worldwide have their own laboratories to compile information, analyse exhibits and carry out research work, the Malta Police Corps now has to seek assistance of the Malta National Laboratory, which takes time and has its own priorities.
Furthermore, Malta no longer has access to the latest research results of foreign police laboratories since Law Enforcement Agencies do not share information with private laboratories.
Dr Abela Medici explained that prior to the split, the Police Forensic Science Laboratory, housed at the Police Headquarters in Floriana, shared very good relations with foreign police entities.
The Police Forensic Laboratory as a unified entity started to be set up in May 1981 when Dr Abela Medici was appointed its first director, with the precise assignment to set up a functional Forensic Laboratory for the Malta Police Force and for the courts of law.
However in October 2001, the Interior and Home Affairs Ministry decided to separate the scientific from the technical sections of the Police Forensic Laboratory and transfer the scientific section, including staff and equipment, to the Malta National Laboratory.
Interview: ‘Police corps has no capability of undertaking scientific investigations’ – Anthony Abela Medici
“Since 2001 when the Police Force lost the scientific sections of the forensic laboratory, the capability of the Police Forensic Laboratory was severely impaired,” Police Forensic Laboratory Director Anthony Abela Medici said in an interview with The Malta Independent.
The forensic laboratory was split up in the wake of evidence in court when a fingerprint officer admitted in 1990 that five years earlier, in 1985, he was forced to falsify evidence. The officer was not a member of the Forensic Science Laboratory in 1985 but was so when he gave evidence in 1990.
Results on specific cases involved in police investigations could no longer be immediately available to investigating officers. While police forces worldwide have their own laboratories to compile information, analyse exhibits and carry out research work, the Malta Police Force now has to seek assistance of the Malta National Laboratory, which takes time and has its own priorities.
Furthermore, Malta no longer has access to the latest research results of foreign police laboratories since Law Enforcement Agencies do not share information with private laboratories.
Dr Abela Medici explained that prior to the split, the Police Forensic Science Laboratory, housed at the Police Headquarters in Floriana, shared very good relations with foreign police entities, often being invited to give lectures, talks and holding discussions on specific fields, while foreign specialists came to Malta to visit, work at the Forensic Laboratory and give expert evidence at the courts of law.
The Police Forensic Laboratory as a unified entity started to be set up in May 1981 when Dr Abela Medici was appointed its first director, with the precise assignment to set up a functional Forensic Laboratory for the Malta Police Force and for the courts of law.
Preliminary work on this project had started in 1978 when the then Police Assistant Commissioner, Lawrence Pullicino, sent a delegation to the UK to evaluate possibilities of having a forensic laboratory in Malta.
Various police officers were then sent for training in various courses in photography, fingerprints, scene of crime, ballistics and explosives in the UK, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Anglu Farrugia, now Labour Party Deputy Leader, was one of these first police officers to train as a scene of crime officer, Dr Abela Medici said.
When first set up, the Police Forensic Laboratory only investigated scientific and medical aspects, including blood analysis, drug and toxicology examinations, analysis of gunshot residue, analysis of explosives, examinations on wood, fibres, glass and all other aspects associated with forensic science.
As more specialised units were set up new staff was trained in their applications and were eventually declared competent to give evidence in court. In late 1985 the technical sections, comprising fingerprints, photography and ballistics were amalgamated with the Forensic Laboratory to form one coherent and unified scientific and technical forensic entity for the Malta Police Force. A few months earlier a new section was set up as a Scene of Crime Unit, trained professionally to handle all aspects of scenes of crime.
However in October 2001, the Interior and Home Affairs Ministry decided to separate the scientific from the technical sections of the Police Forensic Laboratory and transfer the scientific section, including staff and equipment, to the Malta National Laboratory.
During our meeting, Dr Abela Medici went into details of crime scene investigations and the important, at times even imperative evidence that forensic experts come up with as the truth is unveiled.
In his assessment though, Dr Abela Medici said he feels more satisfied when evidence confirms a person’s innocence rather than his guilt as this shows that the checks and balances in the preservation and examination of evidence are impartial and fair, despite the fact that the laboratory is part of the Police Department. The Laboratory has proved time and again its impartial approach to the preservation and examination of evidence. It was unfortunate that the 1985 incident – when a fingerprint officer in 1990 admitted in court that he was forced to falsify evidence – was wrongly attributed to the Forensic Laboratory.
Dr Abela Medici pointed out that forensic evidence owes its origin to Locard’s Principle of Exchange that “every contact leaves a trace”.
“People may be very careful, but they invariably make mistakes and it is up to the Forensic Laboratory to find those mistakes,” he explained.
Thus if a person spends a couple of hours in the same room with another person, fibres from one’s clothes would have deposited themselves on the other’s, even though there may not have been any physical contact, Dr Abela Medici pointed out. Obviously, this would probably be one of a list of traces that could be discovered.
Therefore forensic science specifically deals with the procedures to search and examine trace contacts that necessarily result from every crime committed. Many may associate forensic investigations with the lifting and examination of fingerprints and palm prints. Rightly so, this gives the greatest evidential value linking a suspect to a scene. Such examinations establish common authorship of latent prints found at the scene of crime with the ten-prints of a suspect and may also establish the identities of persons as yet unidentified.
At a scene of crime, the determination of the cause of death is a major question which needs to be answered in any case involving a dead person. One needs to ask whether the cause was accidental, a suicide or a murder. Forensic experts though, must necessarily treat suspicious cases of death as a murder scene right from the initial stages of investigations and later start eliminating possible causes, thereby minimising the risk of leaving out crucial evidence, Dr Abela Medici explained.
The fundamentals of a Police Force owe their origin to Sir Robert Peel who, some 250 years ago, set up the first Police Force in England, which served as a model for other Police Forces worldwide.
The first applications in forensic science were in the medical field where, as Dr Abela Medici explained, the greatest advances occurred towards the end of the 19th century. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, famous for the case of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who had murdered his wife in 1910, had established the fundamentals of forensic pathology. He had carried out some 25,000 autopsies between 1910 and 1947, of which 250 were homicides.
Another famous English pathologist, Sir Keith Simpson, wrote and edited various publications of the book entitled ‘Forensic Medicine’ which is still used by faculties of law and medicine in the training of lawyers and doctors.
In Malta, the first blood group examinations were carried out in 1915 and the first training of medical students in forensic medicine started in 1918. Fingerprint examinations started in 1935 but it was only in 1956 when forensic science was first applied.
By late 1984, forensic officers were attending every major scene of crime in Malta and Gozo. The 1980s saw increased levels of crime and there was a definite need for the setting up of a full scene of crime unit trained to attend each scene of crime on a roster basis.
Scene of crime officers saw 27 bombing incidents in the last three months of 1984, practically all of which happened at night, Dr Abela Medici said. A small core scene of crime unit composed of two police officers and Dr Abela Medici was set up.
The first cases it dealt with were the major heroin haul of 13 kilogrammes found in five different hotels in Malta, and the gruesome find of the dismembered body of Lino Cauchi, an accountant who had been missing for three years, in a well at il-Bosk, situated close to Verdala Castle in Buskett, in November 1985.
Dr Abela Medici and his forensic team also led the scientific and technical investigations in the Egypt Air hijack of November 1985, which was described as the most notorious airplane hijacking of the 1980s.
A total of 60 bodies had to be identified on which post-mortem investigations followed.
Aircraft investigations stretched from analysis of explosives, to ballistics investigations to the search for evidence to establish the real identity of each hijacker, their original planned destination and the organisation which was behind the hijack. Ali Rezaq, the sole survivor of three Palestinian hijackers, was eventually convicted in the Maltese Courts of Law, sentenced to 25 years imprisonment, of which he served seven, before being deported to Ghana where he lived as a free man until 1993. He then flew to Lagos, Nigeria and was turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) by the Nigerian authorities. He was then flown to the United States and sentenced to life in prison on a single count of air piracy after a month-long trial in 1996.
After the amalgamation of the scientific and technical sections within one unified Forensic Laboratory, under the command of Dr Abela Medici in 1986, the laboratory continued to expand and was substantially enhanced when former President Guido de Marco was Justice and Interior Minister.
Dr Abela Medici explained that the lab was very much to Prof. de Marco’s heart and he made every possible effort to allocate funds for the purchasing of scientific and technical equipment as well as the training of staff in foreign institutions.
“This was the golden period for the lab,” he said.
Dr Abela Medici and his team had also assisted in tracking down thieves of Caravaggio’s St Jerome painting. The thieves had started to tear up small pieces of the painting and sending them together with threatening letters to force payment of the ransom, he explained. When the painting was finally recovered, Dr Abela Medici was appointed as its Curator for about 10 months and was kept at the Forensic Laboratory throughout this period until court proceedings were finalised.
However, following events of the Martin Gaffarena jury in 1990, when a fingerprints officer declared in court that he had faked a fingerprint of the accused, various court decisions started requesting independent expert investigations leading to the decision to separate the scientific sections of the forensic lab and transferring them under the auspices of the Malta National Laboratory.
When the forensic lab lost its scientific section, including staff and all equipment, the police were left with no capacity to carry out scientific investigations.
Dr Abela Medici explained that earlier on the same morning we met, a crew from the Administrative Law Enforcement police had found all four tyres of their parked vehicle slashed upon returning to it while on duty. Although they had brought in various instruments which could have caused the slashing and which could have helped to identify the persons causing damage, the lab was unable to carry out investigations and identify the source, for lack of equipment and staff.
The Drug Squad too used to have immediate analysis of drugs under investigation looking into the origins of drugs and giving much needed answers for investigations.
Prof. Guido de Marco, being fully aware of the incident of the police officer who tampered with evidence, had wanted to house both the scientific and technical units of the forensic laboratory outside the police headquarters and decided on Lower Fort St Elmo. This manoeuvre would have maintained the unified forensic laboratory as a law enforcement agency linked to the police and the courts of law.
In Dr Abela Medici’s opinion, this would have been the best solution, however fate had planned otherwise.
Since the decision to separate the two sections of the laboratory was taken in October 2001, the Malta Police Forensic Laboratory was left with only scene of crime duties, finger print and photography departments and ballistics. Later on this expanded to include video enhancements, finger print enhancements and the national documentation centre which mainly deals with examination of counterfeit documents and false travel documents.
With nearly all staff at the Forensic Laboratory being police officers, with the exception of two senior technical officers and Dr Abela Medici as a director of the laboratory included in the government’s civil list, the department boasts of the largest grouping of police sergeants from the police corps.
“Out of a total of 40 staff, 27 are police sergeants,” Dr Abela Medici pointed out. This in itself was something the department was proud of but he continued that it was a pity that if officers sought further promotion to the post of inspector, they were compelled to leave the laboratory.
“The Police Corps would not be able to sustain so many police inspectors within one section, which in a way is a pity,” Dr Abela Medici said.
However a number of former forensic experts including Paul Debattista, Bertu Mula and Pierre Calleja have all climbed the ladder and reached the level of Assistant Commissioners. Thus, Dr Abela Medici believed it was a feather in their cap to have attained such expertise in their respective units which helped them to build on their knowledge to become better officers and to move up the ranks in the Police Corps.
Dr Abela Medici said that he was proud that the Forensic Science Laboratory has achieved so much in the service of the Police Department in particular and in the interests of the Maltese people in general.
