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Leeds Beckett University students work with German police on unsolved murder cases
They have teamed up with the Police Academy of Lower Saxony, as part of Project Analyse, to re-examine the case of a 16- year-old girl who went missing in 1969.
Collectively they have been reviewing case files, before making recommendations to German prosecutors about the best way for the investigation to move forward.
The project is a chance for students to put theory into practice on real world cases while working alongside leading specialists in intelligence analysis.
Using state-of-the-art technologies to collect and interpret information, the team draw out a profile of the victim, reconstruct the crime scene and identify possible new lines of inquiry. These could have developed in light of change in people’s circumstances or with advances in forensic evidence.
As well as assisting law enforcement agencies, their findings could help provide some much-needed answers for families across Europe after the disappearance of a loved one.
In this instance, a group of seven LBU Criminology and Criminology with Psychology students have been working on a no-body murder, along with over 70 other students.
Lecturer at Leeds School of Social Sciences, Kirsty Bennett said:
“This a unique opportunity for our students at Leeds Beckett University. They have been working on case files of unsolved homicides at the request of the German prosecutor, where they can learn new skills as well as applying their knowledge and experience from working on cases from England.
“The students work in small teams to develop best practice of cold case reviews, learning from other teams completing similar work in their respective countries. This knowledge and new skills can be brought back to the teams at LBU to help continue progressing our cases, which are a combination of long-term, suspicious missing person cases and unsolved homicides.”
Project Analyse is part of a collaboration between the Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN -MP), AMBER Alert Europe, Locate International, the Police Academy of Lower Saxony and several other British and Australian Universities which started last year.
This is the second time that students from the Cold Case Unit at Leeds Beckett University have been involved in this collaboration, and their work has been widely commended by the authorities in Germany, as well as being well-received at the Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN-MP) conference last year.