Word: cottoning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...second time in a week, DNA evidence has led German police down a dead end. "Are the heads of our police stuffed with cotton wool?" asked a headline in this week's Bild newspaper. The Phantom is now considered the most embarrassing lapse in German DNA analysis...
...police thought they'd been looking everywhere. But it turns out they should have been looking down - at the cotton swabs they were using to collect DNA samples. On March 26, German police revealed that the cotton swabs they use may have all been contaminated by the same worker at a factory in Austria - and that the Phantom of Heilbronn never existed...
...establish the identity of a burned corpse found in 2002, they were re-examining the fingerprints of a male asylum seeker taken from his asylum application made many years earlier. The fingerprints contained the Phantom's female DNA. Impossible, they thought, so they repeated the test with a different cotton swab - and this time found no trace of the Phantom...
...This raised suspicions that the DNA found at all the Phantom's crime scenes might be traced to a single innocent factory worker, probably employed to package the swabs. Cotton swabs are sterilized before being used to collect DNA samples, but while sterilizing removes bacteria, viruses and fungi, it does not destroy DNA. (Read a TIME cover story...
Originally, Fahmy had no plans to go into fashion. The daughter of a cotton trader, she became an illustrator for Egyptian government publications after graduating from art school. At a book fair in Cairo in 1969, she came across a volume on medieval European jewelry. The book sparked a painful memory of Fahmy's widowed mother, who once had to sell her wedding jewelry to make ends meet. That memory prompted Fahmy to turn her skills to jewelry, and she set out to learn the trade from a craftsman in a cramped and dirty workshop of the Cairo souk. Macdonald...