Well, or not, it seems from a recent report. A Q-tip may be the most wanted criminal in Europe. For years, the police forces of most countries across southeastern Europe have hunted a cop-killing eastern European woman whose DNA turned up at 17 crime scenes. There was no standard MO, no pattern, no consistency but there was one single link that connected them together – DNA from the mastermind criminal responsible for amateurish break-ins, carjackings, two murders and a bullet fired during a marital dispute? Huh? Oops, maybe not.

It’s now believed that the DNA was introduced to the forensic swabs at the factory, and that cops have been hunting someone who probably sticks q-tips in baggies all day and has never committed a crime.

All the swabs used in the forensics works were sourced from the same supplier, a company in northern Germany that employs several eastern-European women that would fit the profile. Even more incriminating, the state of Bavaria lies right in the center of the crimes’ locations, without ever finding matching DNA in crimes on its territory. Guess what: they get their cotton swabs from a different supplier.

The smoking gun apparently was a case where they tried to match a burned (male) corpse to DNA collected from fingerprint samples an asylum-seeker had given a few months earlier. The first test showed a match between those fingerprints and the Phantom’s DNA while a second test did not.

It seems that sterilizing q-tip type swabs is relatively easy to do, and prevents the possibility of infection, but that doesn’t actually remove all the DNA from the swabs.