Electronics Crime Unit to be set up
KARACHI- An Electronics Crimes Unit (ECU) will be established soon in Sindh Police Department to deal with the cyber and electronics crimes. The Inspector General of Police (IGP) Sindh, Syed Kamal Shah has issued orders to this effect, without taking any proper arrangement, sources disclosed.
Electronics and cyber crimes are the yield of high tech-era, which must be dealt with the same sort of expertise and sophistication, to unearth crimes, fix the responsibilities, and to make headway. It is very necessary for persons who are investigating the cases of electronics and cyber crimes that they should know each and every technicality of the subject like an expert.
Sindh police chief’s order for setting-up the ECU, appears a mere lip-service. Without cyber cops, cyber judges, cyber advocates, etc one wonders how cyber criminals would be arrested, and how investigations would be conducted to nab the accused persons.
It has yet to be decided who would conduct hearing of cyber crime cases and who would be competent to decide them, or whether the person implicated is indeed involved in the crime or not.
Reports indicate that in the history of Pakistan, there had been only three cases of cyber crime reported so far. Two of these cases were investigated by the defunct Crimes Branch of Sindh Police, and the third one was a very high profile case, in which a US journalist Daniel Pearl was reportedly kidnapped and later assassinated by unknown persons. Later, some accused persons including a British national were arrested in this case as their involvement was detected purely through high-tech means.
Although the case of the US journalist Daniel Pearl was decided by the learned court, the persons who had been implicated in the crime earlier by the police through cyber means, were the same who were sentenced by the court.
If any investigator were to look deeply into these cases he would see on technical grounds that the evidences gathered by the police investigators in the Daniel Pearl case were not sufficient enough to fix the responsibilities on the accused persons.
Technical evidences must be examined in the light of Articles 6 and 7 of the Evidence Act, under which condition a question would be raised whether the evidences presented before the court in the Daniel Pearl case were justified or not. It might be the government policy, but it remains a fact that gathering and presentation and acceptance of evidences were not smooth and transparent.
Clearly, the police officials who investigated the crime were not bearing any expertise to deal with cyber crimes at all. Whatever the learned court had decided, is acceptable to all but one question remains very pertinent about the validity of the investigation itself which had been carried out without properly-trained officials, who were certainly not cyber cops in this case. Moreover, the court which examined the case was not presided by a cyber judge, which was certainly a need of the case.
It should be recalled here that so far no legislation had been enacted in the country to deal with cases of cyber crimes. It is also worth mentioning here that few multinational banks operating in Pakistan had offered their services time and again to the high police officials for training and provision of the equipment required to deal with the cyber crimes. More than half a dozen meetings in this connection were held with the former IGP Aftab Nabi, but they yielded no result.
Sources close to fraud control units of the different multinational banks disclosed that they had also approached the IGP Syed Kamal Shah, but to no avail. Now, the orders for establishing the ECU were given in writing by none other than the IGP Sindh himself to his subordinates who are undergoing the course of proper formalities, but their implementation has yet to materialise.
Source: The News
Date:5/12/2003
” 
” 
” 
” 
