A JUDGE in the trial of two men accused of murdering two British soldiers will decide whether to allow controversial forensic evidence tomorrow.
Mr Justice Anthony Hart has been hearing legal arguments on the admissibility of the DNA test.
The prosecution claims the samples connect Colin Duffy and Brian Shivers to the gun attack on sappers Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar outside their army base in Antrim.
The defence says the computer-based assessment of US expert Dr Mark Perlin has not been properly recognised by other scientists.
Prosecution barrister Terence Mooney QC told Antrim Crown Court: “It is admissible on the basis that it is derived from scientific evidence which is reliable, proven and advanced by an expert in the field. It is therefore evidence upon which the court can place confidence and give weight.”
Quinsey (23) and Azimkar (21) were shot dead by the Real IRA as they collected pizzas with comrades outside Massereene army base in Antrim in March 2009.
Mr Duffy (44), from Forest Glade in Lurgan, Co Armagh, and Mr Shivers (46), from Sperrin Mews, in Magherafelt, Co Derry, deny two charges of murder and the attempted murder of six others: three soldiers, two pizza delivery drivers and a security guard.
Dr Perlin’s system strongly linked the two men to the getaway car used in the attack. He tested DNA from a seatbelt buckle, a mobile phone and a single matchstick found in or around the Vauxhall Cavalier, which was abandoned partially burned out a few miles from the shootings.
He said a DNA sample found on the buckle was 5.91 trillion times more likely to be Mr Duffy’s than someone else’s, while a sample from inside the phone was 6.01 billion times more likely to belong to Mr Shivers than another person.
The expert also said the DNA on the matchstick was 1.1 million times more likely to be Mr Shivers than someone else.
But the academic’s “True Allele” method of analysing mixed genetic samples and deriving a likelihood ratio is relatively new and has never been admitted as evidence in a UK or Irish court, and only on a few occasions in the United States.
Mr Mooney said: “The absence of a UK validation does not prevent the evidence of a US expert in DNA from being advanced before this court.
“The body of work that has been presented by Dr Perlin in support of his conclusion is a body of work which is recognised by the relevant scientific community.”
He added: “We submit that the method used by Dr Perlin is based on the application of well-understood and long-standing principles. The only new area in this method, as he describes it, is the engineering of those principles into a working test system. It is truly a working test system.”
He said it had been validated and approved in New York state and Pennsylvania and was used to identify victims who died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. – (PA)