Cops making great strides in coming to grips with DNA backlog
By Sisonke Mlamla
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Cape Town - The police management have confirmed that they have made “great strides” to overcome the backlog in DNA testing while the system to track and trace forensic exhibits was now fully up and running.
Police spokesperson Vish Naidoo said that followed a reported disappearance of millions of forensic exhibits at the National Forensic DNA Database due to the Property Control and Exhibit Management (PCEM) system being shut down by the service provider in June 2020.
Naidoo said in fact those exhibits were stored in the Forensic Service Laboratory Administration System and could only be accessed manually.
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Sibahle Motha
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The announcement by police comes after forensic exhibits in the National Forensic DNA Database due to the Property Control and Exhibit Management (PCEM) system “disappeared” after being shut down by the service provider in June 2020.
Since then, SAPS has worked together with the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and developed the Forensic Exhibit Management (FEM) to replace the previous system run by the service provider.
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Simnikiwe Hlatshaneni Picture for illustration purposes: iStock/ipopba A mother of five weeps silently, unable to finish the sentence, My children were shot while they were sleeping. Mymoenah Henson, 49, was woken up one evening in 2019 by her sister, shouting: They are busy shooting our children in the house. Two assailants had entered their house in Westbury, Johannesburg, threatened Henson’s sister at gunpoint and made her wait in the passage while they shot her then 23-year-old son in the chest and his 24-year-old brother in the back. “When I got to the hospital he was on pipes and a heart machine. He was lying in hospital.