Tri-Service
How The British Army's Own CSI Are Beating The Bombers
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have killed and maimed hundreds of British troops and civilians in recent conflicts.
Now a little-known and specialised military team of Army crime scene investigators are taking a new approach to the problem.
One of their skills is gathering forensic evidence from IEDs to help track down the bombers.
They deploy alongside bomb disposal teams to help hunt down the terrorists. One of 2 Military Intelligence (Exploitation) Battalion's officers explained the nature of the team.
“For ease of understanding we're somewhere between CSI and SOCO (Scene Of Crime Officers). So we forensically go in, we exploit the information on the ground. Take it back and conduct analysis on it to inform the intelligence picture."
These British Army bomb teams are among 1,600 British troops in Jordan taking part in Exercise Shamal Storm.
In one of the exercise’s scenarios intelligence leads troops to a bomb factory. The terrorist have fled but not before planting a device.
Just as they did thousands of times in Helmand, an explosives search dog soon locates the IED. What happens next though, is different.
Whereas bomb disposal teams traditionally destroyed most devices they found in controlled explosions, the focus is now on trying to make them safe.
This preserves as much forensic and biometric evidence as possible for the new Army CSI teams to exploit. It's already had an impact as their CO explains.
“There was a terrorist incident in which some soldiers were killed... (Biometric) Information gathered at that scene was later matched to an individual making entry into the UK... He's now in prison."
Crime scene investigation has traditionally been the preserve of the security forces and police.
Now the Army itself can do the job, and beat the bomber.
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