Regional anti-terrorism meeting opens with call for greater co-operation through INTERPOL channels

See also   Speech by Syrian Deputy Interior Minister Major General Saqr Kheir Beq (18/06/2008 - Arabic version only)   Speech by Ronald K .Noble Interpol Secretary General (18/06/2008)

Major General Saqr Kheir Beq, Syria's Deputy Interior Minister, speaking at the Fusion Task Force meeting.

Exchanging more terrorism-related information through INTERPOL is the focus of the working group meeting in Damascus.

The two-day meeting – bringing together representatives from 24 INTERPOL member countries, from North Africa and the Middle East regions, as well as from the Americas, Asia and Europe – will hear calls for countries to take fuller advantage of INTERPOL’s tools and services and incorporate these into national and regional counter-terrorism strategies.

Project Middle East is one of six key regional components of INTERPOL’s Fusion Task Force (FTF), which was created to identify active terrorist groups, and to collect, share and analyze information and intelligence on their activities. All 186 INTERPOL member countries now have access to the names and details of nearly 9,000 suspected terrorists – a 350 per cent increase since the FTF was launched in 2002 – including more than 600 entities linked to Project Middle East.

Opening the meeting, INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said that these results bore out Project Middle East as a positive example of a collaborative approach to security in the region, a far cry from 2002, when there had been little understanding of the value to regional security of sharing information internationally.

“At the first Fusion Task Force meeting, most of the law enforcement officers who came brought their notebooks and pens. It seemed that the main motivation for participating was to get the names of other countries’ suspected terrorists, not to share their own names,” said Mr Noble.

“Six years later, we are replacing our scepticism and hesitance to share sensitive data with an enhanced spirit of co-operation.”

Mr Noble cited the willingness of Iranian and Pakistani authorities to provide INTERPOL and its member countries with the names, photos and other identifying information on suspected terrorists for which little information was available as a sign of progress in the global effort.

“Such high levels of collaboration in terrorism investigations would have been unimaginable even a few years ago,” Mr Noble said. “For these reasons we cannot stop challenging the biases and old attitudes that people have had about how law enforcement should fight terrorism. Instead, we have to think about what we can do to take our current efforts to fight terrorism to the next level.”

Through FTF Projects Kalkan (Central Asia), Amazon (Central and South America), Pacific (Southeast Asia), Nexus (Europe), Middle East and Baobab (Africa), a network of nearly 200 contact officers in more than 100 member countries has been established, exchanging thousands of messages between each other and with INTERPOL on suspected terrorists and developing profiles of suspect individuals in the FTF’s terrorist registry.