Establishing the identity of the massacred tigress in a case of wildlife crime

We report a case study, where we have established the identity from a challenging biological sample of a deceased tigress by parentage analysis. A wildlife crime was committed in one of the zoological parks in India in the year 2000, where one young tigress was killed for its claws. This was of media interest for several days and remained an unsolved case for four years. A framed claw and decomposed tiger hide were seized from the accused in 2005. Biological samples of the victim tigress was not available for further forensics examination, therefore; DNA samples of the biological parents and a male sibling were used to establish the identity of the claw using STRs and mitochondrial DNA markers. Our analysis indicates that the seized claw belongs to the victim tigress