The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is installing its criminal justice DNA database software at the National Forensic DNA Profiling Laboratory in Dhaka to increase the lab capacity, officials on Saturday said.
‘The FBI will also train us to run the software,’ the DNA lab’s national technical adviser Sharif Akhteruzzaman said. An FBI team on Saturday started installing the software, Combined DNA Index System, at the DNA lab inside the Dhaka Medical College compound. The training will begin later this week.
The FBI is giving the software free under a bilateral agreement, Akhteruzzaman, also a Dhaka University teacher, said.
‘The software will increase our capabilities with its capacity to store data on two million samples,’ he said.
Akhteruzzaman said that the software would help to identify a large number of bodies in natural and man-made disasters.
The FBI developed CODIS in 1990, according to the National Forensic Science Technology Centre in the United States.
The centre also said that CODIS allows laboratories throughout the country to share and compare DNA data in the United States.
Officials at the Dhaka lab said that the software would help to identify 300 more unidentified bodies recovered from the Rana Plaza rubble by seeing if their DNA samples would match the samples of people who claimed to be their relatives.
The lab, which began its journey in 2006, is the only laboratory in the country for DNA samples profiling for forensic use.
-With New Age input
