Jamaican police are planning to collect the DNA samples, fingerprints and photographs of every person in the 300-room hotel where Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer was killed earlier this month. Allied to other forensic evidence they hope this will give them the identity of the killer.
Police do not know how many people were in Kingston's Pegasus hotel on the weekend that Woolmer, one of the world's most famous cricket coaches, was strangled but concede it could easily be more than 1,000.
"It is our intention to DNA and fingerprint every single person in the hotel, which is a huge task but I believe it has to be done," Jamaican deputy commissioner Mark Shields told Reuters in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
"I am hoping that when the forensic report is through and we have studied it we will find fingerprints and also DNA of a suspect. "If people were in that room innocently or not at all then the easiest way to eliminate them is by getting those samples now."
Shields said the painstaking police work could take months. Woolmer's lifeless body was found on March 18 the day after his heavily favoured Pakistan side were eliminated from the World Cup by debutants Ireland.
The killing has since become one of the world's most talked-about whodunits with theories of the killer ranging from disgruntled fans or players to match-fixers and gambling syndicates.
Shields said none of those theories have been ruled out. The hotel has two restaurants and two bars and was packed with players, officials and fans attending the Cricket World Cup, as well as the hotel workers and security guards.
They hope comparisons of the DNA and prints they collect from those people with forensic evidence will point them to a killer. At the very least it will help eliminate hundreds of people as suspects. Shields said forensic specialists have not completed their analysis of evidence from Woolmer's room.
A chambermaid found Woolmer's body in the bathroom of his 12th-floor room, prone and partly blocking the door. Police say the killer used his hands to strangle the former England batsman but there was no bruising on his neck.
"It is unusual (that there was no bruising) but there are circumstances surrounding this one which render it not so unusual," Shields said, but did not elaborate. Shields said the killer almost certainly came in the door and was probably let in by Woolmer. It would have taken an acrobat with a lot of nerve to edge around a concrete wall and over a steel railing from an adjoining balcony, he said.
"There was no forced entry to the room which is a very clear indication that two things happened. One is that the person let themselves into the room using one of the key cards, or secondly that Bob opened the room himself. "As far as I can say at this stage there is no record of anybody else opening the door. So therefore we can assume that he let the person in."
Detectives lifted lots of fingerprints from the room and forensic experts are performing a complete range of tests to determine what chemicals were in Woolmer's body. There has been persistent speculation in the 10 days since Woolmer's murder that he was poisoned but Shields said he did not know where such talk was coming from.
Pakistan cricket board officials said they suspect Woolmer died of natural causes and that Jamaican police acted hastily to declare it a murder. Pakistan's players were questioned and gave DNA samples and fingerprints in Jamaica before heading home. It took Jamaican authorities four days to decide they were dealing with a murder. But Shields has since said there was "clear evidence of murder" in Woolmer's room.
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