An­na-Lisa Paul

The Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Fi­nance has ac­quired a Mul­ti-Mode Threat De­tec­tor ma­chine to im­prove its abil­i­ty to de­tect con­tra­band items, in­clud­ing nar­cotics and ex­plo­sives, which are smug­gled in­to the coun­try.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing that bor­der con­trol and se­cu­ri­ty glob­al­ly had be­come more so­phis­ti­cat­ed over the years, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai said, "Gone are the days when cus­toms of­fi­cers could sim­ply eye­ball ar­riv­ing pas­sen­gers to de­ter­mine po­ten­tial risks. Not on­ly have pas­sen­gers in­tent on ne­far­i­ous deeds be­come high­ly adept at sneak­ing con­tra­band in­to and out of our coun­try, the sheer num­bers of peo­ple en­ter­ing and leav­ing T&T have made such sim­ple pro­fil­ing im­prac­ti­cal."

Howai was speak­ing at the hand­ing over cer­e­mo­ny of the equip­ment at Cus­toms House, in Port-of-Spain on Fri­day.Howai said au­thor­i­ties need­ed to step up bor­der con­trol prac­tices in com­men­su­rate fash­ion, hence the in­tro­duc­tion of the 21st-cen­tu­ry meth­ods which he said were cur­rent­ly be­ing de­ployed at all ports.

Howai said the de­tec­tors were on­ly one of gov­ern­ment's ap­proach­es to in­creas­ing bor­der se­cu­ri­ty. He said 50 new of­fi­cers were be­ing trained, and al­lo­ca­tions in this year's bud­get will be put to­wards ac­quir­ing more snif­fer dogs for the air­ports and train­ing han­dlers.

Im­proved mea­sures at the sea ports in­clude ad­di­tion­al con­tain­er scan­ners. A new scan­ner do­nat­ed by the Peo­ple's Re­pub­lic of Chi­na is al­ready in op­er­a­tion at the Port of Port-of-Spain, and Howai is op­ti­mistic that two which were re­cent­ly bought from the US will be ful­ly op­er­a­tional by the end of No­vem­ber.

Two ad­di­tion­al ma­chines are ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in the coun­try next month, and with the help of US Cus­toms, who are as­sist­ing in train­ing lo­cal of­fi­cers, these ma­chines are ex­pect­ed to be func­tion­ing by the end of the year.US Cus­toms and Bor­der Pa­trol at­tach� to T&T Robert L Gross said these ma­chines were very ef­fec­tive, and they were pri­mar­i­ly used in the US, in ex­plo­sives de­tec­tion.

Gross said a group of T&T cus­toms of­fi­cers had just re­turned from Mi­a­mi, where they had re­ceived sea­port train­ing, and that an­oth­er group would soon be trained in han­dling con­tainer­ised car­go and ve­hi­cle search­es. He said the in­tro­duc­tion of fi­bre-op­tic scopes and den­si­ty me­ters would al­so be part of the train­ing.