Police fingerprint system wiped out

Police investigations across the country have been crippled by a huge crash in the national fingerprint computer system.

All 43 forces in England and Wales, including the Metropolitan Police, have been hit by the shutdown of the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (Nafis).

The blunder, described by insiders as the biggest ever police IT disaster, means national checks have not been

run on suspected criminals or

evidence at crime scenes. A police memo leaked to the Evening Standard reveals the network collapsed more than a week ago.

Written by Bruce Grant, head of the Met's Fingerprint Bureau, it states that the meltdown "means that no offender's identity can be verified".

The crash is the latest costly IT disaster to hit government departments or agencies. The Tories today demanded a full inquiry and seized on the incident as proof that David Blunkett's plans for a national ID card system could be wrecked by a computer failure.

The Nafis system, which is run by American computer giant Northrop Grumman, has been the Government's most prestigious police IT project.

It allows an individual force to check if a fingerprint matches

hundreds of thousands of others. Evening Standard has learned that the system went offline at

4.30am last Wednesday, plunging into chaos every one of the 43 fingerprint bureaux across the nation.

Several forces were back on the system by last night but some parts of the country are still not connected today.

A Home Office spokeswoman said that while forces could not check prints nationally they could run local checks.