Facial recognition experts have disputed claims that a British Buddhist living in Australia is Lord Lucan.
The son of Sandra Rivett, a 29-year-old nanny bludgeoned to death in the Belgravia home of the aristocrat in November 1974, claimed new facial analysis established the two men were the same person.
It was carried out by Professor Hassan Ugail, a world-leading authority on AI photo analysis who has previously helped unmask the Skripal poisoners and Jamal Khashoggi’s assassins.
Professor Ugail told The Telegraph on Monday he was “very confident” the images showed the same individual, unless “it is somebody who looks very, very, very like him or an identical twin”.
But after Neil Berriman, Ms Rivett’s son, dramatically announced the findings on the front page of the Daily Mirror, the analysis was called into question.
It emerged that a rival study involving detailed facial mapping techniques had been conducted by Dr Shelina Jilani of Home Office-approved Acumé Forensic, based in Leeds, which concluded there were sufficient differences to “eliminate” any chance the British expat was Lord Lucan.
Dr Jilani’s findings were reported by MailOnline on Monday night, along with a picture of the 87-year-old which had been published in pixelated form by the Mirror.
The unpixelated version of the image revealed what appeared to be clear physical differences between the two men - including the size of their eyes, nose and the protrusion of their ears.
It was reported by MailOnline that Mr Berriman had been told of Dr Jilani’s findings, but was not convinced and subsequently decided to approach the Mirror with his claims.
Asked on Monday night about Dr Jilani’s conclusions, Professor Ugail told The Telegraph her analysis was based on “a human undertaking facial measurements mapping” and “computer algorithms are far superior for face recognition”.
“They can look at and analyse a facial image far deeper than what a human sees to the naked eye,” he added.
“Recent experiments also show that computer algorithms outperform human-based recognition.”
He had earlier claimed in a blog published by the University of Bradford that his algorithm may have cracked Britain’s most notorious murder mystery as a matter of “science and mathematical fact”.
The fate of Lord Lucan has been a source of considerable public fascination since he went on the run after Ms Rivett’s murder. An inquest jury concluded in 1975 that he was responsible for the killing.
Mr Berrimen recently asked Professor Ugail to analyse three pictures of the 87-year-old man whom he became convinced is the runaway peer.
Professor Ugail’s computer algorithm analysed 4,000 dimensions - as opposed to the three dimensions seen by the human eye - of the images and compared them to four older pictures of Lord Lucan at various stages of his life.
“According to the computer algorithm, based on thousands of experiments, these pictures belong to the same individual or someone who looks extremely like them - like identical twins,” Professor Ugail said.
“This is science and mathematical fact. You can’t cheat the algorithm.”
Scotland Yard ‘conclusively eliminated’ Australian man
Scotland Yard began investigating whether the man in Australia was Lord Lucan in 2020, but “conclusively eliminated” him in April last year, following “extensive inquiries” made on their behalf by the Australian Federal Police.
Professor Ugail, however, has made global headlines for his work identifying some of the world’s most wanted men.
In 2018, he helped the investigative website Bellingcat unmask the two Russian agents responsible for poisoning the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the town of Salisbury.
He has also identified three suspects linked to the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 and helped to uncover an alleged Nazi war criminal last year.
Professor Ugail claimed his computer algorithm has “never been wrong”. He said he was particularly confident about his Lord Lucan analysis as he had compared each photo of the man in Australia to every other photo individually.
All of the comparisons returned a likelihood score above 75 per cent - in some cases exceeding 80 per cent - which he said confirms it is either the same individual or a twin.
“It was a fairly thorough piece of work,” he told The Telegraph
The man who Mr Berriman suspects to be Lord Lucan has been living in a suburb of Brisbane in a Buddhist commune where two young Englishmen act as his carers, according to the Mirror. The man is said to have spent some time in Nepal before settling in Australia in the 1980s.
