Three million Afghans pegged for Interpol database

INTERPOL is planning to create a virtual database of fingerprints taken from three million Afghans as part of a scheme to build a global system of links to national criminal databases.

The international police bureau proposed the Afghan plan after signing a similar agreement with Mexico. The virtual database, by which a police agency searching Interpol's database will also be able to search the criminal fingerprint database of another country, was conceived after Mexico offered Interpol two million of its own criminal records.

"The database project for Afghanistan is not NCB Kabul, its going to be somewhere in Afghanistan, we don't know where," Mark Branchflower, head of Interpol's Fingerprint Unit, told the INQUIRER.

"It's going to be sized for up to three million. So we are not going to have three million prints in there to start with. The system will be sized to accept that amount of data," he said.

"We are working with Mexico. They said they were willing to make available to us up to two million fingerprints. What we want to do is not to have those is our database but to have a link so we can search onto those databases," said Branchflower.

The system will operate as a virtual database, and was inspired by Europe's own virtual police database introduced by the Prüm Treaty. Interpol had proposed that Afghanistan's be available to the world's police forces in a similar manner and is trying to raise the funding to pay for it.

"When a country does a search on our data it will also be doing a search on data that's in the Afghanistan database," he said.

The Mexican scheme has not gone live but the ground has been set, he said: " The comms database has been put in place and we are looking at exchanging data. But at the moment we haven't exchanged any data at all. We've signed the agreement to work together to exchange more data but we haven't got together to decide exactly how we will be doing it".

Interpol was trying to persuade other countries to follow suit, but dealing with them in an ad-hoc manner. It had recently sent teams to train police in Kenya and Nigeria to collect fingerprints good enough for its database.

These early steps would become a formal plan: "We hope to get something more structured in place in the next few years," he said.

Interpol launched its Global Security Initiative, a plea to persuade its 187 member countries to give it €1 billion to develop its biometric databases further, on 7 October at a General Assembly meeting in St Petersburg that was presided over the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin. Inerpol wanted more countries to add more fingerprint records to its databases. It also wants them to submit DNA, iris and mugshots.

Interpol has been trying to encourage more countries to share biometric data with its central repository of criminals and suspected criminals. 180 of 187 countries signed up to Interpol actually add fingerprint records with its database.

The entire Interpol fingerprint database contains just 80,500 records, which have traditionally been supplied when a country arrests a foreign national. The Mexican and Afghan operations mark a significant departure.

"Its a completely new way of working," said Branchflower. "Its something we want to promote. I don't see the point of duplicating everything in our database. What I'd rather is that countries allow us to go into their database and do the search."

"The Afghans will have full control over this project. We are working with them. We've got ideas how we would see it being designed. We would like to have a backup of that data for security reasons in the Interpol office," he said.

"We are proposing they have their own full AFIS. We are going to do training for their staff to manage the system. It will be their system. We will be involved in the comms. We will get benefit from it from having access to that data as well," he said.

Interpol unveiled plans to collect more fingerprints in Afghanistan in September in response to a Taleban attack on the Sarposa prison in Kandahar. 900 prisoners were said to have escaped, with up to 350 Taleban fighters in their midst.

After meeting with Afghan security and interior ministers, Ronald Noble, secretary general of Interpol, said the failure of Afghanistan to collect fingerprints from the prisoners and load them onto its international database represented a "serious gap in international security".

"It is vital that the necessary processes are put in place to enable law enforcement to act swiftly and effectively when terrorists and other dangerous prisoners escape from jail," said Noble in a press release at the time. "This is not a problem for Afghanistan alone. It is a global problem that requires global attention."

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations went in with the first wave of Special Forces to collect fingerprints from Afghan soldiers as the US started bombing the country in 2001, according to the Press Democrat, a local newspaper in California.

Branchflower said Interpol had not taken over this data in Afghanistan: "I think you'll probably find is that data is not in Afghanistan. I know the military out there have been taking fingerprints but there isn't a database in Afghanistan as far as we are aware. The data would be with the US Department of Defence. They've been fingerprinting lots of people, but they are searching it back in a database in the US." µ