Prison DNA confirms identity
Records from the prison in Iraq where Abu Bakr alBaghdadi was held in 2004 enabled American commandos to identify his body.
He was then known as Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry, and had been arrested by US soldiers at a house in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, in the Iraqi province of Anbar.
He was one of about 80,000 detainees held at four prisons in Iraq during the Sunni insurgency that erupted after the USled invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was defined as a civilian and detained at Camp Bucca, near the border with Kuwait.
As with all suspects arrested by the US during the insurgency, Baghdadi was photographed from different angles and had his fingerprints taken, along with a DNA sample. He also went through a full biometric procedure, including height, weight and measurement of scars. All the details were collated and stored in an archive of terrorist suspects.
Baghdadi spent 10 months in Camp Bucca after his arrest in February 2004. He was released into the hands of the Iraqi government in December of that year because he was regarded as a low-level threat. The Iraqi government freed him.
It was this biometric and DNA information that was taken on the raid to Baghdadi’s compound in northwestern Iraq.
After Baghdadi killed himself by detonating a suicide vest while in a tunnel beneath the compound, the US special operations commandos managed to retrieve parts of his body from beneath the rubble of the destroyed tunnel.
As President Trump disclosed in his press conference at the White House, he knew within 15 minutes of Baghdadi’s death that the Isis founder had been killed, after the DNA samples matched what had been stored on the computer. – The Times