Audio: Fingerprints automated from tomorrow

The Sri Lanka Police is to introduce an automated fingerprint system in order to identify those involved in criminal activities, police sources said.

"The Police Department is going to introduce the new system from today," Police Spokesman SSP Ajith Rohana said at a media briefing today.

He said the Police Department currently had fingerprints of some 500,000 criminals or persons related to any kind of criminal activity. “But out of them some 130,000 persons are dead or gone missing and the police are maintaining the remaining numbers of records properly,” he said.

“Now the police can identify if any person is a criminal within three minutes, whereas we earlier took at least fourteen days. That was the reason for the delay of issuing police certificates to the public,” he said.

He also said the new system was done by the Information Technology experts at the University of Colombo and ICT at a reasonable cost. “We initially planned to purchase the system from Japan for Rs. 800 million, but luckily we able to purchase it locally at an economical price,” he said.

SSP Rohana said in the future, the entire Police Department was going have the ‘Virtual Persons Networking’ known as VPN system connecting all the 403 police stations in the country. “Then we will be more technologically advanced and easily get everyone’s fingerprint details in a short period,” he added.