The prosecution offers new evidence to counter the claim by two foreign experts regarding the semen samples taken from Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan.
KUALA LUMPUR: New evidence produced by the prosecution team in the Anwar Ibrahim Sodomy II trial indicates that sperm can survive in a person’s anus up to 113 hours.
Lead prosecutor Solicitor-General II Mohd Yusof Zainal Abiden said that a 1997 research paper entitled “Sexual assault and semen persistence” stated that spermatozoa can survive between four to 113 hours in the rectum before being extracted.
“It would appear that after 1982, they are saying that from all these (research), the survival time has gone beyond 65 hours (as stated before),” said Yusof.
Previously, Australian forensic expert Dr David Lawrence Noel Wells, who is a specialist in sexual assault cases, had testified that to get a positive sperm cell extraction after more than 20 to 36 hours was “exceedingly rare”.
He said that in practice he would not take samples which were more than 36-hours-old.
While Wells did agree that he cannot rule out a single United Kingdom “Forensic Science International” journal published in 1982 which claimed that sperm survival was up to 65 hours, he however expressed deep reservations on relying on the paper’s findings as he said it was the only study to have made such a claim in 30 years.
Australian DNA expert Dr Brian Leslie McDonald expressed a similar opinion. He also wondered how the samples obtained from Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan were in “pristine” condition.
In his opinion, the 98-hour-old samples should have degraded due to bacteria growth.
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