Carisa Lee

A par­cel of land, a floor plan, a cost and a con­trac­tor have al­ready been ear­marked for the con­struc­tion of the new Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in St Joseph.

This was re­vealed yes­ter­day by Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Fitzger­ald Hinds, who said the fa­cil­i­ty will cost tax­pay­ers TT$204 mil­lion.

Dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence at the cur­rent St James lo­ca­tion of the FSC, Hinds said Gov­ern­ment had tak­en the de­ci­sion to pro­vide a brand new and im­proved space for the very im­por­tant el­e­ment of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

“Sev­en times big­ger than this one and it will be out­fit­ted with the most mod­ern of tech­nolo­gies,” Hinds re­vealed.

Con­struc­tion will be done by a com­pa­ny from the Peo­ple’s Re­pub­lic of Chi­na and Hinds ex­pects their ar­rival with­in the next three weeks.

“We will sign the MOU…when we do that, a con­trac­tor will be iden­ti­fied and the work will start and we ex­pect that that work will take place over an 18-month pe­ri­od,” he said.

But the Min­is­ter is not wait­ing for the new build­ing to pur­chase equip­ment.

Hinds said in the last two years, with the help of the Act­ing Di­rec­tor of the Cen­tre, Der­rick Sankar, they changed pro­ce­dures, pro­cured equip­ment and trained or up­skilled staff.

Sankar re­vealed that pri­or to last Sep­tem­ber, the DNA test­ing ma­chine they had was out of ser­vice for two years and they had to send some sam­ples abroad for test­ing. How­ev­er, this changed when they got a brand-new ma­chine.

“In Sep­tem­ber 2021, we start­ed to recom­mence DNA op­er­a­tions, where we did up to 260 and more DNA pro­files,” Sankar said.

He said these cas­es were cru­cial to the TTPS Homi­cide de­part­ment but they al­so gave many fam­i­lies clo­sure.

Ex­plain­ing the im­por­tance of the ma­chine, he said with­out the tech­nol­o­gy, they could not iden­ti­fy bod­ies burnt be­yond recog­ni­tion in fires. How­ev­er, with the new ma­chine, Sankar re­vealed that they took swabs from some fam­i­lies and ex­tra DNA from the bones to get a pos­si­ble match and were suc­cess­ful in iden­ti­fy­ing 23 uniden­ti­fied bod­ies.

The Act­ing Di­rec­tor added that DNA test­ing can help al­so with the re­cent spate of home in­va­sions, es­pe­cial­ly if no fin­ger­prints are found by in­ves­ti­gat­ing of­fi­cers.

“If we don’t catch you with the fin­ger­print, we will get you with the DNA … you break a glass to en­ter a build­ing, you get cut, the blood that re­mains there is part of a per­son’s DNA,” he ex­plained.

He said they are cur­rent­ly as­sid­u­ous­ly build­ing their DNA data­base to match fin­ger­print­ing of sus­pects in the sys­tem.

Sankar said their staff will go up to 13 as they got the green light for five po­lice of­fi­cers and two foren­sic sci­en­tists in foren­sic DNA.

“We will be able to turn out more cas­es,” he said.

Head of the Homi­cide Bu­reau, Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Rishi Singh, said since the up­grades at the cen­tre, the po­lice have been re­ceiv­ing their test re­ports in a much time­li­er man­ner.

“As a re­sult of that, we have been able to bring clo­sure in many in­stances to mem­bers of the pub­lic whose fam­i­lies have suf­fered from crime in par­tic­u­lar mur­ders,” Singh said.

He said they have al­so been able to make sev­er­al bal­lis­tic con­nec­tions to firearms used in crime.

Sankar said their al­lot­ment of bal­lis­tic ex­perts was now 23, up from four.

“There are now in­di­vid­ual bal­lis­tic ex­perts who will in­di­vid­u­al­ly take cas­es and process them,” he said.

He said two years ago when Min­is­ter Hinds vis­it­ed the cen­tre, there were 7,000 firearms back­log cas­es with about 40,000 ex­hibits.

“The 21 po­lice of­fi­cers that have been trained have al­ready knocked out 2,000 of those cas­es and those cas­es are very lengthy cas­es,” he said.

Sankar said they know their re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and will im­prove step by step.

“We will con­tin­ue in our dri­ve to be bet­ter,” he said.