Police in Germany hunted a sinister phantom killer for two years after finding the same DNA at 39 different crime scenes - only to discover that the source was a woman who made the cotton buds used to collect the sample!

The case was one of the most puzzling in recent times. Hundreds of detectives in six specialist committees were set to work hunting the ominous female serial killer.

But there was no progress, despite investigators finding her DNA at so many crime scenes.

The police were stumped. They eventually offered a 300,000 euro reward to find the killer.

It's no surprise the money was never claimed, however, because the so-called ‘phantom killer’ was a complete myth!

Detectives had apparently been tracking the DNA of a factory worker who packaged cotton buds used by the police to collect samples, according to ‘Stern.de’.

Police linked the 'killer' to seven murders.

The most notorious case was in April 2007 in Heilbronn where a 22-year-old policewoman was shot dead and her colleague (25) seriously injured. On the back seat of the police car, detectives found what they thought was DNA from the mysterious killer.

As part of the investigation, 800 previously convicted women were questioned - but there was no match to the sample.

Her DNA was found over and over again: in bottles, tank lids, on bullets – and once even on a biscuit!

Traces were found in southern Germany, Austria and France. Thousands of saliva tests were taken but there was still no answer.

In April 2008, detectives ran out of ideas, so an internal inquiry was launched.

And yesterday Bernd Meiners, a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Saarbrucken, revealed: “There are considerable doubts about the existence of the ‘phantom killer’. The DNA has instead been linked to investigation materials.”

An employee at the cotton bud manufacturer has apparently been pretty careless!

According to reports, the maker of the buds is a company in Hamburg, with branches in Baden-Wurttemberg and the Saarland as well as Austria and France.

The company has been supplying the police investigators with cotton buds since 2001.

The smallest planet around a normal star other than the Sun may be even smaller than first thought. A new analysis suggests the rocky body weighs just 1.4 Earths - less than half the original estimate. Observations over the next few months should test the prediction.

Most known "exoplanets" are huge gas giants, hundreds of times Earth's mass, and were discovered by detecting the wobble they induce in their parent stars.

But in 2008, astronomers discovered a planet estimated to weigh just three Earth masses. Called MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b, it claimed the title of the lightest known exoplanet, apart from one tiny world discovered orbiting a dead star called a pulsar.

Doctors treating an elderly Chinese woman for stomach ache were stunned when they found that she had been carrying an unborn child for 60 years. Ninety-two-year-old Huang Yijun, of Huangjiaotan, revealed that her child had died in the womb way back in 1948, and that she did not have it removed because doctors would charge 100 pounds for the job.

"It was a huge sum at the time - more than the whole family earned in several years so I did nothing and ignored it," the Sun quoted her as saying.