CLOPPENBURG, Germany (AP) — Police seeking the rapist-murderer of an 11-year-old girl will collect saliva from 18,000 men in a German town this week and test the samples for DNA.
The voluntary genetic tests are an unprecedented evidence-gathering technique in Germany.
The tests will be conducted on men ages 18-30 in the area around Struecklingen, the girl’s hometown of 3,500 people near the Dutch border and the North Sea.
The strangled and stabbed body of Christina Nytsch was discovered March 21 in woods eight miles from the town. She had disappeared five days earlier on her way home from an indoor swimming pool.
About 250 police will conduct the tests Thursday and Friday in Cloppenburg. They expect results within a few weeks.
Mass DNA testing helped Welsh police catch a killer in 1996. It was also used successfully in a 1986 rape and murder case in central England, which later became the subject of a Joseph Wambaugh book, “The Blooding.”
But two rounds of DNA tests in a western French town have failed to produce suspects in the murder of a 13-year-old British girl.