A police DNA blunder led officers to wrongly link a neo-Nazi killing spree to the unsolved murder of the ‘German Madeleine McCann’, it has emerged.
Officers reported last October that genetic material found near the skeleton of nine-year-old schoolgirl Peggy Knobloch, who went missing in 2001, matched that of Uwe Boehnhardt.
This seemed to connect the child’s death to the 2000-2007 racist murder spree on the National Socialist Underground, far-right militants who shot dead nine men with migrant roots and a policewoman.
But it has now been established that the DNA found near the girl’s corpse was in fact inadvertently transferred there through ‘police equipment’ from the corpse of late neo-Nazi gunman Boehnhardt, said prosecutor Daniel Goetz.
Boehnhardt and his accomplice Uwe Mundlos had died five years ago in an apparent murder-suicide following a botched bank robbery.
It remained unclear which piece of police equipment had been used in both cases, Goetz said, but media reports have pointed at a measuring stick police use on crime scenes.
Something like that ‘should not have happened,’ admitted Uwe Ebner, who leads a special inquiry into the child murder.
Knobloch vanished on her way home from school in 2001 near her home, in a high-profile case that captivated the nation.
Hundreds of police and soldiers scoured the area for weeks, but her remains were only found in July last year, some nine miles from her home, by a mushroom picker.
After her death, a man with a learning disability spent more than 10 years in jail for her murder before he was exonerated and released, as police resumed the search for her murderer.
The disappearance of Peggy came to haunt Germans in much the way that the vanishing of Maddie McCann, while on a holiday with her parents in Portugal, scarred the collective psyche of Britons.
Join GhanaStar.com to receive daily email alerts of breaking news in Ghana. GhanaStar.com is your source for all Ghana News. Get the latest Ghana news, breaking news, sports, politics, entertainment and more about Ghana, Africa and beyond.