Police used DNA left on the robbers' fake beards to track the pair down. Photo / Getty Images
They were meant to be part of a cunning disguise to elude capture, but the fake beards worn by a pair of robbers in Italy proved to be their downfall.
The bearded bandits were identified from traces of DNA that they left on the beards during a bank raid in
Paderno Dugnano near Milan.
The genetic traces enabled police to match the suspects - a 40-year-old Italian and his accomplice, a 60-year-old man from Serbia - with records on a national data base.
The two men donned the beards while robbing a branch of the Bank of Brescia in February 2014.
Armed with pistols, they locked the bank's employees in a room within the branch and then forced the manager to open the safe, from which they took 50,000 ($83,370) in cash.
