[2011] 7 MLJ A B C D E F G H I Public Prosecutor v Muhammad Rasid bin Hashim (Abang Iskandar J) 847 Roslan standing next to her. The accused denied raping the deceased or having anything to do with her murder. Held, convicting the accused of the offence of rape and sentencing him to 18 years imprisonment and five strokes of the rotan and convicting the accused of the offence of murder and sentencing him to death by hanging: (1) The unsworn statement made by the accused when juxtaposed side by side with the evidence led by the prosecution witnesses, especially the evidence of the pathologist who carried out the post mortem and the chemist who carried out the DNA profiling, had not created a reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case. The pathologist had testified that the head injury sustained by the deceased was consistent with injuries inflicted by an electric iron. The said electric iron that was recovered from the scene of the crime had mixed bloodstains on it, which on analysis by the chemist were found to belong to both the deceased and the accused. The only reasonable inference that the court could draw from such a circumstance was that there must have been a struggle between the deceased and the accused and that the accused would have used the electric iron to inflict the head injury, which likely caused her death. This piece of independent evidence from the chemist completely debunked the accused’s version of events when he said that he had nothing to do with the head injury sustained by the accused. Further, the evidence of the chemist had clearly exonerated the said Roslan. According to the chemist there were no traces of the said Roslan’s DNA profiled from the human stains retrieved from the person of the deceased or from the specimens retrieved from the various items recovered by the police forensic team from the scene of the crime. In the circumstances the accused’s version that when he came to, he saw Roslan standing by the deceased who was lying on the mattress could not in all probabilities be sustained and was a mere afterthought created by the accused that did not cast any reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case (see paras 44–45, 47 & 56). (2) The accused’s contention that the failure by the prosecution to produce any fingerprints of the accused from the scene of the crime must be fatal to their case could not stand. In the light of the advent of DNA profiling techniques, fingerprinting as the preferred mode of detecting criminals is a thing of the past. In this case, the presence of the overwhelming evidence in the form of positive mixed DNA profile match-up between the accused and the deceased, as per the uncontroverted testimony of the chemist, had rendered the absence of physical fingerprints of the accused inconsequential. The chemist’s evidence taken together with the evidence of the other prosecution witnesses such as that of the off-duty security guard that at about 2.30pm of the day in question he had seen the accused, whom he knew by sight, standing on the stairs near the second