Bagging ballistics for fingerprinting all part of job for bomb squad

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - You won't see bomb squads on the big screen gently putting the makings of homemade explosives into little plastic baggies.

Come to Kandahar, however, and you just might. A lesser-known part of the bomb squad's job in southern Afghanistan is to collect evidence from any place explosives are laid so experts back at Kandahar Airfield can dust for fingerprints.

The bomb-disposal team doesn't do the dusting, but some of them spent time with scenes-of-crime officers from the Toronto Police Service to learn how to gather forensic evidence.

Those soldiers wear rubber gloves as they carefully collect and catalogue the trappings of war.

"We are certainly not as professional or as good at it as police forces are," said Canadian Maj. Chris Cotton, commanding officer of Task Force Kandahar's counter-improvised explosive device squadron.

"But the intent is the same: pulling as much information off the scene as possible and ideally feeding any information that's gained from that scene, inclusive of fingerprints, back into the prosecutory process."

The prints and other information are run through a database that's owned by the United States and managed on behalf of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

The database is made up of prints from anyone who applies to work for ISAF, along with detainees and people who voluntarily offer to be fingerprinted.

"It is a work in progress," Cotton said of the database. "It is certainly ... not as mature as it needs to be."

Fingerprint matches are turned over to military police, who pass the information on to the Afghan authorities.

Then it's up to Afghan authorities to find and prosecute suspects.

Cotton said he's not sure if Afghan authorities have ever captured and prosecuted anyone based on information pulled from bombs and other evidence. But that's the goal.

"It's slowly but surely getting there," he said. "Is it as efficient as it needs to be? No. But it's getting there."

Makeshift bombs are the weapons of choice for insurgents in their fight against soldiers from Canada and other countries serving in Afghanistan. The deadly devices have caused 84 of the 140 Canadian deaths during the Afghan mission.

That grim tally speaks to the need to stay one step ahead of insurgent tactics.

That's why the bomb squad brings back evidence from bomb scenes whenever they're called in, explosion or not.

The task now falls to foreign troops. But Cotton said Afghan soldiers are being trained to gather evidence from bomb scenes. Eventually it's hoped the entire process will fall solely to Afghan police.

"Ultimately, in the ideal world, it's the (Afghan National Police) doing the post-event analysis and investigation," Cotton said.

"And it's them that are taking that information that they've collected and analyzed on their own and prosecuting the bad guys as criminals."