ISLAMABAD, Jan 25 US Deputy Chief of Mission Peter W. Bodde inaugurated the Pakistan automated fingerprint system (PAFIS) here on Friday and declared it a “major contribution to police modernisation 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 laboured together to put this system into operation,” the American diplomat said. Pakistan now has a centralised, uniform and modern method for collecting and categorising fingerprints, he added.

According to a press release, the US-based firm Lockheed- Martin designed and implemented the five-year $13 million PAFIS project with funding from the US Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and the Law Enforcement Affairs.

Pakistani partners in the project are the National Police Bureau, Police Service of Pakistan and the Federal Investigative Agency (FIA).

“The PAFIS brings a state-of-the-art law enforcement tool to Pakistan and multiplies the capabilities of the Pakistani law enforcement agencies to identify those who perpetrate terrorism and other criminal acts,” Mr Bodde said.

Before the advent of the 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, the PAFIS has already shown good results. Of the 440,000 fingerprint records the 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.