A FINGERPRINT expert who lost her job over the Shirley McKie scandal has launched a legal bid to get reinstated.
A FINGERPRINT expert who lost her job over the Shirley McKie scandal has launched a legal bid to get reinstated.
Fiona McBride is claiming unfair dismissal after being asked to leave her post with the Scottish Criminal Records Office in May last year after almost 23 years.
Miss McBride, of Clydebank, was one of four fingerprint officers who identified a mark left at a murder scene as belonging to former Strathclyde Police detective Shirley McKie in 1997.
Miss McKie was later tried and acquitted of perjury relating to the case. The ex-policewoman was awarded £750,000 in compensation in 2006.
Three SCRO officers accepted redundancy in March last year. Miss McBride, 43, took her case to the employment tribunal in Glasgow where the panel began hearing evidence yesterday.
Witness David Mulhern, chief executive of the Scottish Police Services Authority, a body formed last year which incorporated the SCRO, said that the McKie affair had had a debilitating effect on staff at the Glasgow Fingerprint Bureau.
He confirmed that he adopted the position there was a misidentification, as had the Scottish Government and the Association of Senior Police Officers and Her Majesty's Police Inspectors.
The panel heard the four fingerprint experts were suspended from duty in 2001 by the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland.
An independent investigation followed and they were reinstated a year later, but were not allowed to carry out their normal duties.
The case continues.
