Press Releases 2008
U.S.-Funded “Pakistan Automated Fingerprint Identification System” Launched
01/25/2008
Islamabad – The U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission, Peter W. Bodde, inaugurated the Pakistan Automated Fingerprint System (PAFIS) here today and declared it as “a major contribution to police modernization in Pakistan” and “an outstanding example of bilateral cooperation” in law enforcement.
“I salute the persistence and dedication of those Pakistanis and Americans who have labored together to put this system into operation,” the American diplomat said. “Pakistan now has a centralized, uniform, and modern method for collecting and categorizing fingerprints.”
The U.S.-based firm Lockheed-Martin designed and implemented the five-year, $13 million PAFIS project with funding from the U.S. Department of State Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Pakistani partners in the project are the National Police Bureau, the Police Service of Pakistan, and the Federal Investigative Agency.
“PAFIS brings a state-of-the-art law enforcement tool to Pakistan and multiplies the capabilities of Pakistani law enforcement to identify those who perpetrate terrorism and other criminal acts,” DCM Bodde said.
Before the advent of PAFIS investigators had to conduct manual comparisons, a time-consuming and unproductive method of seeking information. Now, with PAFIS, Pakistan has the capability to place into a central database the fingerprints of every criminal who is arrested anywhere in the country. Police from all corners of the country can compare fingerprints collected at crime scenes against the prints that are registered in the central PAFIS database in Islamabad.
In its first months of operation, PAFIS has already shown good results. Of the 440,000 fingerprint records Pakistani police have collected, some 122,000 are already active in the database. The system is connected to 52 remote terminals, and this will expand in the future.