Bone DNA helped identify remains of man found in tent (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Bone DNA helped identify remains of man found in tent

8:00am Saturday 15th September 2012 in News

A painstaking police investigation involving Bradford detectives, DNA experts, Interpol and Slovakian police managed to identify a homeless man whose skeletal remains were found in undergrowth in a tent close to Bradford city centre.

After detectives sent the man’s thigh bone for DNA testing, they were able to get a profile for him and match it to details on a police database naming him as 50-year-old Jirik Balog, of Slovakia, a Bradford inquest was told yesterday.

The inquest heard Mr Balog had come to the UK about seven years ago, but could not return to his home country because he had been robbed of his passport.

Bradford South detectives managed, with help from Interpol, to trace Mr Balog’s brother to enable his family in Slovakia to be told of his death.

Police, who were tipped off about the human remains by an anoymous phone call in March last year, also worked with the National Missing Persons Bureau as part of the investigation. They were given dozens of possible names for the identity of the body, which could have lain camouflaged near Forster Square Retail Park since the summer of 2010.

Despite the mystery over Mr Balog’s identity being solved, a forensic post-mortem examination was unable to establish what caused his death, leading Bradford Coroner Peter Straker to record an open verdict.