€100m Pink Panther robbers snared by fingerprints

Fingerprint technology is helping Interpol crack a notorious gang of jewel thieves dubbed the Pink Panthers - thought to have snared €100m from daring heists worldwide.

Prints taken following an arrest in Monaco this month matched those of a suspected member of the Pink Panthers gang, which has been linked to 100 high-value armed robberies in more than 20 countries.

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Two individuals suspected of being members of the Serbian gang were picked up by police in Monaco after an officer attending a car crash recognised a man from a photograph circulated by Interpol.

The gang got their name after members hid a diamond ring worth several hundred thousand pounds in a jar of face cream in 2004.

For Mark Branchflower, head of Interpol's fingerprint unit, it drives home the importance of its Automated Fingerprint Identification System (Afis) which holds 80,500 sets of fingerprints taken from non-nationals arrested in 153 countries across the world.

The database can be accessed by every one of its 187 member countries, down to the level of the officer on the street, and has prints from 750 crime scenes. On average it has a 10 per cent hit rate for complete sets of prints checked against the database.

The force is hoping to add photographs to the database to allow facial recognition from next year.

Although 20,000 sets of fingerprints were added in 2008 Branchflower said that Interpol still has some way to go before it can crack its target of getting one million fingerprints on the database next year.

Speaking at Biometrics Conference 2008, he said: "Every country that arrests a non-national should send a fingerprint scan to Interpol. We want more countries to provide us with data."

Interpol has also created a fingerprint database in Afghanistan with room for three million prints and is rolling out five fingerprint scanning terminals nationwide. The database will be linked back to the Afis system.