The focus of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of atomic spectrometric techniques applied in forensic science (i.e. linking crime scene evidence to a crime by applying analytical techniques). This article provides a short description of the spectrometric techniques applied in forensic sciences and an overview of selected applications. In addition to general forensics, environmental and nuclear forensics are covered. As the number of publications in this field is very high, it is clear that the existing literature can be covered only partially and a fraction of representative examples can be cited.