FIA to get funds for capacity building

LAHORE
THE United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has agreed to provide financial assistance to the FIA authorities for their capacity building in the technology.
The sources in the federal capital told The News that in the first step towards the capacity building of the FIA, the UNODC had decided to provide five Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for each Zone of the federal agency including Peshawar, Quetta, Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi Zones. The cost of each such system ranges from Rs four million to Rs eight million. The move will help the FIA officials to locate the suspect. For this purpose, the Australian government, under the Australian Federal Police Plan, has decided to allocate Rs 20-25 million in the upcoming budget and money would be given to the UNODC which would complete the task. “The UNODC will provide us five GPS by June this year”, a senior FIA official confirmed to The News on Thursday. He added that the UN’s Office had already provided this facility to Punjab and Islamabad Police to deal with the prevailing wave of terrorism. The purpose of the UNODC for providing this facility to police and the FIA was to have better policing, prevention and investigation of the crime. “UNODC believes it will also help in dealing with transnational crimes”, he said adding the UNODC officials would also impart training to the FIA trainers. It is pertinent to mention here that previously only intelligence agencies of the country had the GPS facility and FIA, Police and other law enforcement agencies had to rely on the secret agencies for any such facility to locate any suspect.
The UNODC has already funded two forensic labs, one each to Punjab and Sindh, which costs Rs 100 million each.