LAHORE: The state-of-the-art Pakistan Automated Fingerprints Identification System (PAFIS) has been inoperative for the last one year or so, aggravating problems of hundreds of complainants and blocking detection of crime against property cases.

The system set up at the Federal Investigation Agency’s headquarters, Islamabad, in 2008 to modernise police in developing centralised database of criminals’ fingerprints and comparing fingerprints collected at crime scenes with the preserved prints, has already completed its five-year life and needs funds for up-gradation, Punjab police officials say.

The biometric identification technology, which initially covered 52 districts and is now outdated, is aimed at storing fingerprints of arrested criminals across the country and helping police in comparing their fingerprints with new prints to track down all types of criminals and terrorists.

Officials claim despite release of some amount out of total Rs302m allocated by the federal government a year ago, the National Police Bureau (NPB) of Interior Ministry (the project implementation body) has failed to install new main server and expand other paraphernalia to 12 left-over Punjab districts and some of other provinces apparently due to red tape and least priority.

They further say the capacity of hardware and software of the system was exhausted as the main server and its connecting servers installed in different districts of the country are not accepting new cards.

Officials say the US-based firm -- Lockheed Martin -- which designed and implemented the project with five-year plan, initially did not foresee that a large number of criminals would join the database.

Investigation officers of Punjab police are sending fingerprints in dozens of cases being reported every day to the Central Police Office, Punjab, which is unable to process the data to the NPB because of non-acceptance by the central database system initially installed for five years at a cost of $13m. The project was jointly funded by the US Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and the Law Enforcement Affairs.

The same situation exists in other three provinces which also rely on PAFIS to trace hundreds of dacoity, robbery and theft cases.

A senior police investigator told Dawn that the fingerprints matching helped Lahore police in at least 37 cases of crime against property as suspects were arrested with the help of prints data comparison.

He said earlier investigators had to conduct manual comparisons, a time-consuming and unproductive method of seeking information.

The investigator said owing to over-aging of PAFIS, police were forced to rely on manual comparisons of prints and database of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra).

A police source told this reporter that PAFIS had fingerprints data of up to 2.5m criminals country-wide out of which 1m are from Punjab.

He said up to six cases for fingerprints matching were reported to the Punjab Investigation Wing from across the province on a daily basis, adding a good number of out of total 14,976 under-investigation cases of crime against property were linked to the outcome of fingerprints results. The source said though the provincial police were in the process of printing 300,000 cards for fingerprints lifting for current year, the interior ministry seemed to be least bothered about upgrading the system.

He said police authorities were considering seeking Punjab government’s help to have its PAFIS system to improve working.

The scale of the problems can be gauged from the fact that investigation process of a theft case registered with the Factory Area police in Lahore a month ago was stopped due to non-availability of fingerprints report.

Police took fingerprints of the suspects from the crime scene in the case and dispatched for fingerprints matching but the report is pending for the last three weeks or so.

“We have been visiting offices of police officers concerned but they have expressed their inability to provide report results to further process the case investigation and arrest criminals,” said complainant Hafiz Saad Rafique who lost mobile phones, accessories and calling cards worth Rs2.1m during a burglary at his shop.

Police failed to provide any relief to Rafique, who was targeted for the fourth time by thieves in the last few years.