DNA testing
We’ve got him! ’were the words of Paul Bremer, U.S. governor in Iraq, at a press conference on 14 December 2003. From the beginning of the war in Iraq in March 2003, one of the stated missions of the United States military was to kill or capture Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, in order to remove him from power after more than two decades of threatening the world and terrorizing his own people. However, Saddam was known to have many ‘ stunt doubles ’ to protect his life from assassins. Therefore, the ability to verify his identity through genetic testing was essential to knowing that the United States in fact ‘ had their man. ’ Forensic DNA testing using short tandem repeat (STR) markers played an important role in the identification effort behind the words of Paul Bremer. Validate dreference samples are required in any missing persons investigation or paternity testing when kinship is being verified through similarities in nuclear or mitochondrial DNA profiles. In this case, DNA from Saddam’s two sons provided the family reference samples. Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a gunfight near Mosul, Iraq, on 22 July 2003. DNA samples were collected from their remains shortly after they were killed for use as reference samples in verifying the identity of their father if he was ever located. Both autosomal and Y-chromosome STR profiles were generated from Uday and Qusay’s biological samples. Shortly after Saddam was captured in a small hole underneath a farmhouse near Tikrit, Iraq, in December 2003, blood and hair samples were flown to the United States where they were immediately examined by DNA scientists at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) located near Washington, DC. Working through the night, several scientists carefully extracted and then amplified the DNA sample using the autosomal STR kits Profiler Plus and COfiler to obtain a full 13-locus STR profile. These STR profiles possessed alleles in common with the previously generated DNA profiles of Saddam’s two sons. Additionally, the Y-chromosome STR kit Y-PLEX 6 also showed full allele sharing between Saddam and his two sons, indicating that the sample in question was from their same paternal lineage. Saddam’s capture was a great relief to many who feared his reemergence and continued terror campaign.