Claim that Jack the Ripper has been unmasked by DNA evidence as a Polish immigrant barber is WRONG, say experts 

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Scientists have said evidence which claimed to have unmasked Jack the Ripper is wrong because a decimal point may have been put in the wrong place during calculations to match the killer's delay with his descendants.

Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes, claimed to have found the identity of the notorious killer after he studied DNA on a shawl found near one of the murder victims.

He extracted DNA from the shawl and was able to match it to descendants of the alleged killer, Aaron Kosminski, and one of the Ripper's victims, Catherine Eddowes - ending more than a century of speculation. 

However scientists claim that Dr Louhelainen made an 'error of nomenclature' in his analysis and therefore the 126-year-old mystery of the killer's identity still remains.

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An image depicting police discovering one of the victims of the murders in London which took place in 1888

They suggest Dr Louhelainen may simply have put a decimal point in the wrong place, leading him to mistakenly assume the DNA sequence he found was far more rare than it was and could be matched to descendants. 

In fact, they say, the sequence he found could be shared by the majority of the population and therefore cannot be matched to Kosminski - one of the suspects in the string of murders which took place on London's streets more than 100 years ago - or the Ripper's victim.

Kosminksi, a Polish immigrant, was believed to have been unmasked as Jack the Ripper. 

He was 23 when the murders took place, and living with his two brothers and a sister in Greenfield Street, just 200 yards from where the third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was killed.

The revelation ended doubt over more than 100 suspects, which included Queen Victoria’s grandson – Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence – the post-Impressionist painter Walter Sickert, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone.

Dr Louhelainen, a molecular biologist at Liverpool John Moores University, started work on the case after he was contacted by businessman Russell Edwards, 48, who bought a shawl at auction in 2007. It had been found next to Miss Eddowes and was stained with what was believed to be her blood. 

Experts claim errors in the analysis of the DNA mean that claims sequences are linked to those of Catherine Eddowes (left), one of the Ripper's victims, and suspect Aaron Kosminski (right) are wrong 

Businessman Russell Edwards bought the shawl in 2007 and published the findings in Naming Jack the Ripper

The scientist extracted six fragments of DNA from the shawl using a method called ‘vacuuming’ because the sample was so old.

This involved using a pipette filled with a special ‘buffering’ liquid which removes the genetic material without damaging it.

He then used the database at Institute of Legal Medicine to match one with one of her descendants, Karen Miller, the three-times great-granddaughter of Eddowes.

Another DNA fragment was matched to a descendant of Kosminski's sister who has asked not to be identify. 

There have been a number of suspects for the Jack the Ripper murders, including Kosminski (above) 

A poster calling for the capture of Jack the Ripper, which was published in the Police Gazette in 1888 

In a book published by Mr Edwards about the identity of the killer, Dr Louhelainen said the DNA was a global private mutation (314.4C), which occurs at an incredibly rare frequency of 1/290,000. He said he calculated this using the database at Institute of Legal Medicine.

But experts say the mutation in question is actually 315.5C and not rare at all. It would have given a frequency of 1/29,000 at the time of Dr Louhelainen's analysis, as there were 29,000 entries on the database when he did his calculations in 2011. 

This suggests the decimal point was put in the wrong place, making the sequence far less rare, Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting, told the Independent. 

He said: 'If the match frequency really is 90 per cent plus, and not 1/290,000, then obviously there is no significance whatsoever in the match between the shawl and Eddowes' descendant, and the same match would have been seen with almost anyone who had handled the shawl over the years.' 

Mannis van Oven, professor of forensic molecular biology at Rotterdam Erasmus University and Hansi Weissensteiner, based at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck, have also raised concerns about Dr Louhelainen's study.

A spokesman for the Sidgwick and Jackson, which published the book, said they are investigating the error and that the author stands by the conclusions made.