Scores of stolen passports identified in Caribbean with help of INTERPOL tools

One hit occurred on 16 March at the international airport in Barbados when immigration officers using the solutions to search INTERPOL’s database of stolen and lost travel documents discovered that a Nigerian man who claimed to have been naturalized in Venezuela was traveling on a stolen Venezuelan passport.

The INTERPOL National Central Bureaus (NCBs) in the countries on his travel itinerary were alerted, and the man was arrested upon landing in Guyana. He was to travel on to Brazil and Venezuela.

The technical solutions – called MIND/FIND, for mobile or fixed INTERPOL network databases – give law enforcement officers in the field direct access to the nearly 14 million records in INTERPOL’s database.

The number of searches in the database has skyrocketed since MIND/FIND became operational in the region. In 2006, the nine host countries submitted 455 queries to the database with five hits. With the installation of MIND/FIND, law enforcement authorities have conducted more than 241,400 searches, with 44 hits, between 1 January and 21 March.

INTERPOL worked with the host countries – Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago – to expedite the installation of MIND/FIND before the tournament. The border-protection system currently in place is among the most advanced in the world.

An INTERPOL Major Event Support Team (IMEST) is on the ground in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to assist officers from host countries’ NCBs and international liaison officers at the Regional Intelligence Fusion Center.

INTERPOL provided support to host countries during several large-scale sporting events in 2006, including the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, the football World Cup in Germany, and the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar.