In what could be a major innovation in crime investigation, scientists of the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) solved a centuries-old mystery which has been haunting many East European countries. The CCMB scientists proved beyond doubt that the relic excavated from the ruins of a church in old Goa was that of Queen Ketevan of Georgian Kingdom who was murdered by Islamic invaders in 1624.
Ketevan, the Queen of Georgian kingdom, was taken prisoner by Shah Abbas-I (1587 to 1629) of the Safavid dynasty in Persia (modern day Iran). Though the invaders put pressure on her to renounce Christianity, she refused. Abbas wanted her to marry him. “When she refused, she was stripped to the waist, tortured with hot irons, crushed with a flaming brazier and strangled,” wrote luke Harding of The Guardian. She was murdered on September 22, 1624.
Missionaries of St Augustine Portuguese Catholic Church who were eyewitnesses to the gruesome murder brought her remains to Goa and interred the same in St Augustine Convent. The remains, which included the bone of her right hand, were stored in the convent for more than 400 years. Modern day Georgian scholars came to know about Ketevan’s remains lying buried in Goa through the scribbling of a Portuguese chronicler.
Iraki Menagarishvili, the then Foreign Minister of Georgia, flew down to New Delhi in 2000 and sought the help of his Indian counterpart Jaswant Singh who readily agreed to help the Georgians get the remains of their Queen. The ASI was asked to excavate the ruins of the St Augustine Convent. The ASI team located the remains in May 2004. “Since, we do not have any expertise in ancient DNA study, we contacted the CCMB scientists to conclusively prove that the remains belonged to Ketevan,” said Nizamuddin Taher of the ASI.
The scientific innovation, which was used for the first time in India, has become handy in establishing the identity of victims murdered hundreds of years ago or even identifying dead bodies through Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) analysis. The innovation is expected to help crime investigators find out identity of the victims by making use of their bones or hair or any part of the body. For those who are not familiar with scientific jargon, DNA is the basic building blocks which make human bodies.
The CCMB investigation has all the ingredients of an international best seller. The CCMB scientists collaborated with archaeologists of the Archaeological Survey of India and scientists of Estonian Bio-Centre to resolve the mystery. The investigation proved that the centuries-old remains excavated from the ruins of St Augustine Church Complex in old Goa was that of Queen Ketevan, held in reverence by the people of Georgia as Ketevan the Martyr.
The CCMB has the expertise to extract DNA from ancient bone samples. “We studied the DNA sequence of 22,000 individuals from the sub-continent. None of them matched with the samples collected from the remains excavated from St Augustine Convent,” Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj, senior scientist, CCMB, who led a team of investigators told The Pioneer. But the remains matched with those samples from Georgia, which proved that the remains could be that of Ketevan, said Dr Thangaraj.
Dr Thangaraj said though they may not be able to pinpoint sharply the exact identity of centuries old remains, details like nationality and region to which the victim belong could be identified.
K Ragothaman, former CBI official who investigated the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, said that the identity of Dhanu, the human bomb who detonated the belt bomb to assassinate the former Prime Minister was established by CCMB scientists through DNA studies. “But at that time her body was available for sample collection,” said Raghothaman.
The work by the CCMB scientists got global recognition with Mitochondrion, a scientific journal publishing the research paper with prominence. Well, this is an innovation which has the capability to make Sherlock Holms envious. Dr Thangaraj and his team of researchers had earlier demolished the Aryan-Dravidian divide theory considered sacrosanct by the Dravidian Parties in Tamil Nadu.
In a recent research paper, they claimed that there was nothing Islamic about Mesopotamia, considered as the cradle of Islamic civilisation. The research showed that the famous Mesopotamian heritage owes it to migrants from the Indian sub-continent.