The body of a young woman was dismembered and placed in several plastic bags and left on a public road. Her death was the result of a crime of passion. Upon medico-legal examination, no skin was found on the palmar side of the distal and medial phalanges of all finger pads on both hands (which were also dismembered). Through the process of finger pad recovery, it was possible to find tissues that had adhered to the body and reposition the exactly on each finger to recover fingerprints. Finally, the victim was identified using the conventional fingerprinting process.

After reviewing the medical literature of various classifications of blast injuries, we present a proposal called the Bogotá Classification, aimed at the study of cadavers with injuries present in cases of death caused by explosion. We also present a case that occurred in a residence in the city of Bogotá involving an improvised explosive device, resulting in three deaths.

The main objective of the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science (Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses) is to provide scientific support to the administration of justice in Colombia, through this activity it has forged itself a remarkable reputation and has opened the door to various expressions of knowledge in the forensic field. In over a century of practicing this specialty, the Institute has provided answers to numerous questions that have been asked by legal authorities in the clarification of criminal offenses. Over this period of time, the Institute has acquired experience in the analysis of cases of all forensic disciplines and has shared it with other national and international entities, mainly through personalized training in its laboratories and different branches.

This is the case of a typical request for a chemical laboratory analysis to conduct a comparison of materials or trace evidence with completely unexpected results from those obtained if established protocols had been followed. This request involved the collation of black gunpowder, a material which is generally associated with firearms. In this case, however, the prosecutor’s request was to compare the powder from two groups of paper used in tejo (a popular Colombian sport) in order to ascertain the identity of a homicide suspect at the scene of the crime.

When faced with an element which is the suspected cause of a cut or lesion, dental casting can be made to compare characteristics observed on the surface of the tool mark with those found on the bones. There is a large variety of materials available on national and international markets to record and analyze marks or signs that an element leaves on any given surface (bite marks, tool marks on bones, finger prints, etc.), all of which are useful in forensic investigation (1). However, the unconventional application of odontological techniques and the use of materials such as alginate and silicone have been found useful recovering tool marks on bones, which allows the forensic scientist to clearly establish when an element was used to cause cuts and injuries in an individual. This technique has been applied in five cases of possible homicide with the use of a cutting element and, as a result, has generated highly accurate casts. It also shows that both materials are appropriate for this purpose, and although silicone offers greater detail in the impression, either material can be used depending on the commercial availability.

This is the case of a six-year-old schoolchild —identified as J— who was born with ambiguous external genitalia. Upon medical recommendation, the child was registered as male by the parents; however, further testing (diagnostic imaging and karyotyping) showed that the child was biologically female. Based on this, the parents started the judicial process to change their child’s name, and the judge ordered a forensic psychiatric evaluation to determine the child’s true sex1. When the forensic study concluded that the child’s sex was female, the result was transmitted to government authorities and the name was corrected in the child’s civil registry. 1 Literal request from the court

Verapamil is a synthetic derivative of papaverine, which is used therapeutically as a hypertensive, antiarrhythmic and antianginal. This study describes an analytical method for the determination of verapamil in biological matrices of blood and urine, which consists of a liquid-liquid extraction of samples for analysis using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS/ MS), with flurazepam as an internal standard. The method was applied to the acute fatal intoxication of a 17-year-old young woman who consumed 170 tablets of verapamil; the concentration of this medication found in the blood was 18.261mg/L and 0.369mg/L in the urine. This study also puts forth the use of LC-ESI-MS/MS in the analysis of verapamil in biological samples for applications in forensic toxicology.

An anthropological trauma analysis was conducted on an individual killed by multiple injuries from a combined sharp and blunt mechanism using a cold weapon (machete) to the head, trunk and upper extremities. After conducting the autopsy, the cranial fragments were submitted to the anthropology laboratory for cleaning, restoration and study; later, plaster reproductions of the cutmarks with clear striations were made and a gel was developed to take impressions of the marks left by the machete recovered at the scene and submitted for study; finally, a visual comparison of the striations observed on the bone and those left by the machete in the gel was conducted.

Armed conflict in Colombia has played an important role in the missing people phenomenon, in which the Government has the duty to identify, recover and investigate the crime in the process of the victims’ reparation. However, identifying missing people is a complex process because of the huge amount of time it consumes and the lack of information regarding the identity of the missing people, which is the norm in most of the cases. In such cases in which there is little information on the identity of missing people (including data of their relatives), DNA analysis and databases are of key importance in the identification process. This is why we present two cases that exemplify the role of DNA databases in the successful identification of missing people.

The same day as being involved in a traffic incident as a pedestrian hit by a car, a middle-aged woman accessed emergency medical care and was later discharged. After two days the patient returned to emergency with complaints of neck pain. X-rays were conducted was immobilized with a cervical collar. Since the pain persisted, she was examined a few days later by physiatry, where a limitation in the arc of motion of the neck was found and whiplash was considered a possibility. This type of cases related to chronic posttraumatic pain are relatively common in clinical consultation and represent a great challenge for physicians, mainly in the forensic field, since there are often many symptoms and very few signs to identify the damage. Therefore, a forensic doctor must recur to the clinical history and carefully examine the mechanism of injury and the evolution of the clinical presentation, in addition to calling on other disciplines such as orthopedics, physiatry, psychiatry and pain medicine to issue a definitive concept.

An alternative procedure used in the recovery of soft tissues of the fingers (pulpejos) of a body in an unidentified condition that was long exposed to fire, is presented, in such a way that routine fingerprint identification procedures were not applicable. A long process of hydration using solutions of iodopovidone and Complucad® allowed the restoration of tissues and positive identification by fingerprints of the deceased.