There is a lot that the real life CSI: Erbil and its small screen counterparts have in common. Commitment of the officers. The philosophy that, as the man put it, “Evidence never lies.” Some of the equipment would look familiar, if less glossy, to a TV devotee; the microscopes, the fingerprint cupboards, the omnipresent cameras capturing everything in close-up. There is a lot still do to. Fingerprint database is still on cards rather than computers. The women, ahem, dress a little differently. And maybe the script doesn’t quite sparkle in the same way. No one may say “Suspect: You won't be able to prove a thing; Horatio: That is a really dumb thing to say to a CSI”: but the intent in Erbil is the same.
A scriptwriter for a putative CSI: Erbil would find plenty of drama, though, much of it from families and the misnamed evil of ‘honour crimes’. A recent case: a couple marry for love and flee to another town. After a week of marriage, their car is ambushed. The CSIs painstakingly remove 8 bullets from the two dead lovers and trace the bullets back to a family owned gun and match the tire tracks to the family car. A man is jailed for ten years for rape. He protests his innocence. DNA proves him right. A women suspected of having an affair is found hanged at home. But all is not as it seems. Why is there a man’s skin under her fingernails, why are the rope marks wrong, and what about those bruises on her body? A conviction ensues. The Kurdistan Regional Government is trying to tackle honour crimes head-on. Ministers here say: Murder is murder, honour is no defence in Kurdistan. The laws are all there, but traditions however gut-wrenching die slowly. What used to be un-investigated, is now being investigated. What used to be brushed under the carpet is now being brought out into the open. It is far from perfect but without the painstaking evidence-gathering of CSI: Erbil, so-called honour crimes would go unpunished.
The red tape? The practise in Kurdistan is that, as an act of compassion, after a murder a neighbour would wipe away the blood and remove the body to save the spare familial grief unintentionally destroying the integrity of the crime scene. UK and US trainers have been teaching first response cops cordon and control techniques. Literally, putting red tape round a crime scene to preserve it and calling in CSIs as soon as possible. Simple, but effective.
(Source: UK Embassy in Baghdad)
Comments are closed.