Guwahati, Sept. 13: Assam police have built up a fingerprint database of over 35,000 convicts for assistance in crime investigation.

The Finger Print in India 2015 report of the Central Finger Print Bureau released recently says that fingerprints continue to be widely used by investigators across the country with Assam having a database of 35,192 fingerprint receipts (10-digit) till December 2015. The fingerprints agency is under the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

"Fingerprints of the accused not only help us crack cases of theft, murder and forgery but also acts as a reference for criminal cases in the future. In many cases, convicts resort to more crimes after completing the jail term. In such cases, we can match the fingerprints of the convict and identify the criminal. Since repeat offenders adopt many smart ways to give the police a slip, we can identify the criminal by matching their fingerprints and produce them in court as evidence," a source in the Assam CID told The Telegraph today.

The state fingerprint bureau that collects the samples and compiles them operates under the CID.

One of the important cases solved by the aid of fingerprints was the triple murder in Guwahati on June 20 last year where a businessman allegedly killed his wife and two daughters at Banaful Path under Hatigaon police station here before jumping into the Brahmaputra.

The businessman's body could not be traced but his fingerprints on land documents matched those on the victims' bodies and some other objects, which led the police to conclude that he is the main accused. The fingerprint matching helped the police as they had earlier suspected another person.

It was suspected the businessman had committed suicide as his car was found near a bridge over the Brahmaputra hours after the incident.

NIA sleuths had solved another case in Guwahati in 2013 involving N. Shanti Meitei, chief of the People's Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak, a Manipur-based militant group, who used a fake identity to purchase properties in the name of Hemanta Sharma. Matching of fingerprints on land documents led the NIA sleuths to conclude these fingerprints were identical.

The CID had collected 2,602 fingerprint slips for search and matching in 2013 followed by 2,236 in 2014 and 1,535 in 2015. Headed by a deputy superintendent of police, the state finger print bureau has 13 personnel comprising two inspectors, six sub-inspectors, one assistant sub-inspector and three constables. It has a sanctioned strength of 23.

"Though fingerprint matching is sometimes not considered high profile in comparison to ultra-modern crime investigation techniques like DNA analysis, it is still the widely used and the most acceptable method. Fingerprint evidence is generally considered to be highly dependable both by jurists and experts," the report said.

Mizoram has compiled 5,500 fingerprints followed by Meghalaya (4,337), Nagaland (408), Tripura (239), Manipur (221) and Arunachal Pradesh (37).