The details of exactly who first identified the ear comparison and who transmitted the fingerprints to Interpol are not perfectly consistent across all sources.

What is clear is that by the time Interpol’s fingerprint confirmation came back, the case was over.

The biometric evidence — fingerprints, which the international criminal database could match against Bourdin’s existing European criminal record — was definitive.

There was no narrative available to explain away a fingerprint match.

This final exposure — the confrontation of social identity with biological identity — was the moment when the deception collapsed.

Not the moment when people stopped wanting to believe, but the moment when the evidence was so specific and so definitive that the believing machinery had nothing to work with.