Is Lord Lucan alive? Computer expert says elderly man in Australia's face is 'conclusively' same as vanished killer
7 November 2022, 08:48 | Updated: 7 November 2022, 09:02
A new twist in the disappearance of Lord Lucan has emerged as a facial recognition expert believes he has matched his face to an elderly man in Australia.
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Professor Hassan Ugail – who previously identified the Russian hitmen behind the Salisbury poisonings – believes his algorithm is "never wrong".
The computer scientist used the AI algorithm to run 4,000 cross-checks of seven photos – four of Lucan and three of the man in Australia, The Mirror said.
And he is convinced it is a match for Lucan, who killed his family's nanny and then disappeared in 1974.
It comes 48 years to the day that he murdered Sandra Rivett before disappearing, with many believing he jumped off a ferry in the Channel. His body was never found.
The man, who lives outside Brisbane in Queensland, was found by Ms Rivett's son, Neil Berriman. He is 87, the same age Lucan - real name John Bingham - would be.
However, these claims have not been verified and it is unclear if police could even act on the photo analysis.
"I've spent nine years trying to prove this man is Lucan. Now, with this new scientific information, the police must act.
"This isn't emotion. It's fact."
Read more: Murder probe launched after man stabbed to death and another wounded at Kent village pub
Prof Ugail said: "In recent years there has been a massive improvement in artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology.
"We can now confirm things that would have been impossible just five years ago. We've compared thousands and thousands of people and there have been literally millions of photos that we've analysed using the algorithm.
"It has never been wrong. This algorithm has been trained on millions of photos.
"People of different ethnicities, different ages – the only time it will fail is if you put in identical twins. It only takes a few minutes to run it and it comes back with a percentage – a 'similarity index'.
"Even if you put two exact images of the same person, you are never going to get 100% similarity because of the way images are taken – pixels and everything else.
"Anything with a similarity index of 75% or higher is conclusively the same individual."
Prof Ugail had previously found the two men behind the Salisbury poisonings were Alexander Mishkin and Denis Sergeev, with the two having adopted aliases during their mission to kill Russian defector Sergei Skripal in 2018.
The Lucan case has fascinated Britain for decades.
Lady Lucan ran from her Belgravia home covered in blood, telling people in the nearby Plumbers Arms pub that she heard screams from the basement.
Her husband attacked her there, she said.
His car was later found, with blood on the interior and a lead pipe covered in bandages, abandoned in East Sussex. He disappeared on November 8, the day after the killing.
An inquest found Lucan was responsible for Ms Rivett's death and in 2016 he was declared legally dead.
Lady Lucan, or Veronica Bingham, took her own life in 2017 after wrongly believing she had Parkinson's.
