British police zero in on southern Caribbean in search for serial rapist of elderly
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (AP) – London police have narrowed their search to the southern Caribbean for a serial rapist believed to have attacked nearly 100 elderly women and men in Britain, a forensic scientist said yesterday.
British forensic specialist Ray Fysh said scientists who worked on the human genome project used an advanced form of DNA testing to identify the rapist’s ancestral blood lines.
“He is probably British,” Fysh told The Associated Press. “But it is clear to us that our suspect has ancestry from the southern Caribbean, anywhere from Dominica in the north down to Trinidad in the south.”
Fysh was in Trinidad with London police, who have brought their search to the Caribbean. They will travel to Barbados tomorrow to meet with police there and devise strategies for catching the man who has evaded arrest for more than a decade.
Police say the unknown suspect has assaulted 88 elderly women and 10 elderly men in southeast London since 1990. The attacks have often been separated by several years, said London police Detective Superintendent Simon Morgan.
“That shows he could be travelling outside of Britain during those periods, perhaps to the Caribbean,” Morgan said.
According to a police profile pieced together from interviews with victims, the suspect is an Afro-Caribbean man in his late 30s. He is tall, athletic, most likely rides a motorcycle and has lived in south London or the south coast city of Brighton for some time, Morgan said.