That’s irresponsible

Once upon a time there was a programme on TVM called 'THAT'S INCREDIBLE!' Remember? The one where a live audience would intermittently respond to whatever was thrown at them on the show with a pathetically over-rehearsed chorus of... yes, you guessed it... "THAT'S INCREDIBLE!"

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Well, I have often thought of producing an equivalent show for local consumption... the only difference being that the sort of stuff we have to put up with here in the real world (unlike the parallel universe that is TV) really is incredible sometimes.

Consider this, for instance. A 17-year-old Russian girl (not that the nationality makes a difference... at least, not now that we have a clear idea of what actually happened) vanished in Paceville late on Monday night. She was last seen at a place called Cabana, which (or so I am told) is little more than a stone's throw from where the lifeless body of a young woman was found, in an advanced state of decomposition, just over a week later.

Yes, I'm afraid it's beginning to sound rather incredible already. We are in the middle of what is probably the most populated part of Malta - literally thousands of tourists (not to mention locals) congregate in and around Paceville in summer, and many of them walk right past Villa Rosa on their way to and from St George's Lido at all times of day and night.

And yet it took a full eight days for a badly decomposing dead body to be found in the vicinity... a fact that is bizarre enough in itself, even without the little detail that it was found less than half a kilometre away from where the missing girl was last seen alive.

Incidentally, it wasn't even the police who found her in the end. It was tourists at a nearby guesthouse, who complained about the smell.

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OK, now for the truly remarkable bit. Three days after this grisly discovery, the same body has not yet been officially identified. No, I kid you not. The media are all (correctly) referring to the body as that of Polina Rahman... but not because of any official police confirmation to that effect. Indeed, the police have not uttered a single word about the case since releasing a very sketchy press statement on Tuesday at around 6.30pm.

Since then, all attempts to find out any additional details (like... erm, whose body was it anyway?) have returned the same generally unhelpful answer: 'Sorry but we are unauthorized to release any information at this stage. Please try again later, thank you" (or words to that effect).

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All this might admittedly change by the time you read this article - which I am writing on Friday - but I somehow doubt it, because the police are still awaiting DNA test results which have to come all the way from London. From what I'm told this could take anywhere up to a week, possibly more.

What does all this mean? Well, one thing it means that you can go missing in Malta - a country the size of a peanut, in case nobody's noticed - and not only will more than a week pass by before your dead body is accidentally stumbled upon by people who weren't even looking for it anyway... but it will then take another week for the police to finally confirm (if at all) that it is, in fact, your body, and not someone else's ... despite an overwhelming abundance of details by which you could very easily be identified, long, long before molecular biology came into the picture at all.

Obviously, in the meantime your family will be tearing their hair out, and the Internet will (by the inevitable law of supply and demand) be awash with increasingly fanciful conspiracy theories, suggesting that it was not your body that was found, but that of a hitherto unknown identical twin... or some kind of alien body-snatcher which abducted the real 'you' and replaced it with a doppelganger, etc. etc.

Can anyone therefore be surprised, if existing conspiracy theories meanwhile take root to such an alarming degree, that people will keep on circulating them even long after the facts are belatedly confirmed?

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This, I fear, is the price we all pay for uncertainty in this increasingly insane world. Leave a question unanswered for as much as five minutes, and people will rush in to fill the gaps in public knowledge with any of a million implausible scenarios... some of which will be automatically believed, no matter how downright incredible. Can you just imagine, then, what sort of nonsense people will start believing after two whole weeks of question marks hovering over a macabre discovery of an as yet unidentified corpse?

And yet, all this while the police (just like everyone else) have known precisely whose body it was that cropped up in a valley in St George's Bay last Tuesday. It's not as though they have nothing but DNA to go on, you know. They have her ID card, for crying out loud. It was in her purse, which was in her handbag, which was found near the body... which was wearing the same clothes that the missing girl was last seen wearing, while walking in roughly the direction where the body would later be found.

Yet ask the police if they've identified this body, and - until last Friday, at any rate - the official answer was 'No'. (Which reminds me... in case the police were wondering, the letter 'I' in 'ID' stands for 'Identity'... and not 'I don't have a frigging clue').

Another detail worth bearing in mind is that all these clues now in the forensic investigators' possession - clothes, handbag and ID card, etc - will all be covered in the poor girl's fingerprints. So my question is: what the heck is stopping the police from matching the fingerprints found in the vicinity of the body, with fingerprints retrieved from the missing girl's possessions (like her suitcase, and all it contains)... which would presumably still be at the San Gwann residence where she was booked for a two-week sojourn?

Let's face it: it can't be because her next of kin hadn't yet been informed -a perfectly valid reason, if there ever was one - because the parents were called in to view the body last Wednesday... and would presumably have been shown all the ancillary evidence, too.

Nor can the police still be waiting for the fingerprint test results: seeing as (unlike the case with DNA) the equipment needed to match those fingerprints is all already in place and ready for use here in Malta - otherwise, why the hell would they bother taking the entire country's fingerprints for the purposes of issuing biometric passports? Why keep an entire database of the nation's digital signatures, if you have no means to actually compare those prints to any others when the need arises?

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Lastly, the police are also in contact with the dead girl's relatives, and I find it slightly hard to believe that - in this day and age of lightning speed Internet connections, etc - it would take a week to get a copy of her medical records from Russia.

Such data would include dental records: so even if the body was in such an advanced state of decomposition that it was unrecognizable even to her parents... well, the teeth would still be intact, and would be expected to remain so for a good few hundred years at least.

And yet, with all this information practically screaming her identity at the top of their combined voices... the police have not yet officially confirmed that she is (or, sadly, was) Polina Rahman. I don't know about you, but I find that truly incredible. And so bloody irresponsible, too.

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Naturally, not everyone shares this particular opinion of mine. I have even heard a diametrically opposed view: i.e., that the police are being 'responsible' by withholding that information, while gossip and speculation are allowed to spread all around us like wildfire.

Evidently there is a new definition of the word 'responsibility' currently running around somewhere... but it is more the misplaced reliance on scientific methods that I find annoying in this instance. Listening to the letters 'DNA' being bandied about nowadays, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the police are actually powerless to deduce anything at all, without the certainty of genetic evidence to support their claims. 

What utter nonsense. DNA was discovered in the 1960s, and its practical application to forensics is for obvious reasons even more recent than that. In fact DNA testing has only been a reality in local crime scene investigation for the past 10 or so years. Remember the curious case of the cigarette butts discovered at the scene of the attempted murder of Richard Cachia Caruana in 1994? That was 20 years ago, and the police afterwards justified having thrown that evidence away on the grounds that... 'we didn't have access to DNA testing at the time'.

Then as now, it is a lousy excuse to destroy evidence, and one can hardly claim to be surprised that the cigarette butt detail contributed in no small way to a mountain of conspiracy theories surrounding that particular (officially unsolved) crime.

Meanwhile: what on earth happened to all the other traditional methods to determine the facts behind any given case: sometimes with the same degree of certainty now provided by genetic science?

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Anyone who has had any dealings with the CMRU will know from experience that 'lack of DNA evidence' is in fact just an excuse not to commit themselves to any particular statement of fact. Of course the police know whose body they found - they just don't want to tell us, that's all.

Is this 'responsible'? Quite the opposite, I would say. The real truth of the matter is that the police do not make public assertions because they don't want to accept responsibility for the conclusions of their own investigations. Instead, they want us, the media, to do their job for them (as in fact many of us already have - most media have given up waiting for 'official confirmation' of such an obvious fact, and are now referring to the deceased as 'Polina Rahman'. with or without DNA confirmation).

And this has in fact been the situation with the Maltese Police Force for some time now - a situation which has steadily deteriorated over the years, until the positively farcical climax we all witnessed on New Year's Eve... when, because the police were quite frankly stumped over a double murder in High Street, Sliema (and still are, by the way - less than eight months later the case has already been archived as 'unsolved'), they simply turned to the media and asked us not to report the case at all... lest we 'fuel speculation' among the wider public.

Honestly now. Do we really need a crap TV programme to tell us... THAT'S INCREDIBLE??