Ms Lois West:

We have said from the very beginning that we are not investigators. We were looking for others to come on board with us to get that consensus view as to whether there were issues. I have a difficulty in that whenever there is a homicide in this country now, we always get a phone call. Myself and my colleague will get a phone call asking for analytical support for the investigation. We have become nearly indispensable to supporting those investigations. From that point of view, it is clearly recognised that analysts add value to investigations. It is irrelevant that one is not actually an investigator because everybody has a different expertise and value to bring to an investigation. My concern with this was as follows. We recognised early on that we did not have access to the investigation files, and we never claimed to have had that access. We were concerned, when we saw report on 8 May, that it, perhaps, was not representative of the fact that we had always said, "Look, we have this and this but we do not have the investigations files." The report was also misleading in that it kind of focused on those being the two solo sources of information that Ms Galligan had when she compiled her report. In effect, she had access to other information such as coroners' findings and so on either because they were recorded on PULSE or she did a lot of open-source research around these to try to ascertain information that she could not glean from the PULSE system.

I am concerned that 15 months have elapsed since Ms Galligan produced the first report in November 2016 and we still have not seen the investigation files, nor have the members of PDIM seen all of the files. There may have some requested to clarify particular information. As of this point, there has not been an independent review of those investigation files. For my part, I cannot understand how PDIM could produce a report, and how certain assurances could be given on the basis of that, when those investigation files had not been reviewed by us or anyone else, as far as I could tell.