The Madhya Pradesh cadre Indian Police Service officer was addressing a conference of fingerprint experts here and cited the Aarushi murder case as an example of how important fingerprint collection was in a criminal case.
The NCRB director said there was carelessness in the way investigations were carried out, but stopped short of blaming the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for the unsolved case.
He said the local police, who reached the scene of the crime first, neglected crucial evidences.Fourteen-year-old Aarushi was found murdered under mysterious circumstances in her parents' Jalvayu Vihar apartment in Noida, Delhi's suburban town in Uttar Pradesh, May 16, 2008. The family's domestic help, Hemraj, initially suspected for the teen-ager's murder, was also found killed on the flat's terrace a day later.
The CBI moved the Ghaziabad court Dec 29, 2010, seeking permission to close the Aarushi murder as an unsolved case on grounds of lack of conclusive evidence.
In its closure report, the agency has named the 14-year-old girl's dentist father Rajesh Talwar as the lone suspect in the case.
"When the CBI got the case, they did not have much scope to investigate it", Tripathi said.
However, he clarified that since he was not associated with the investigation, his statement should not be taken as a comment.
"It was just an example that fingerprints have so much importance and it should be used well to nail the killers," he said later.