Overview
- Federal Police, which carried out court‑ordered raids Monday, March 23, recovered the missing samples and sent them to the agriculture ministry for testing with Anvisa providing technical support.
- Argentine researcher Soledad Palameta Miller was detained and later released under court limits, and she now faces charges of aggravated theft, procedural fraud and illegal transport of a genetically modified organism.
- Parts of the material turned up in freezers at another faculty and investigators found signs that other samples were tossed in regular trash, raising fresh questions about access controls and chain of custody in a BSL‑3 lab.
- Unicamp opened an internal probe and said all recovered material is now in federal custody, while it cooperates with investigators and withholds details that could affect the case.
- Police are also reviewing possible links to Agrotrix, a campus‑incubated startup co‑founded by Palameta Miller and her husband, as local media report the samples may have included influenza H1N1 and H3N2, which officials have not confirmed.