The year 2004 witnessed what was probably the most highly publicized fingerprint error ever exposed: the case of Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney and Muslim convert who was held for two weeks as a material witness in the Madrid bombing of March 11, 2004, a terrorist attack in which 191 people were killed. Mayfield, who claimed not to have left the United States in ten years and did not have a passport, was implicated in this attack almost solely on the basis of a latent fingerprint found on a bag in Madrid containing detonators and explosives in the aftermath of the bombing. Unable to identify the source.
