The opening ceremony of the training course saw the presence of Deputy Director of the Police Department of Environmental Crime Senior Colonel Le Thom and a representative of the INTERPOL Environmental Security Unit, Ms. Tricia Tan.
The training course is participated in by 20 police officers from 4 under-ministerial police departments and police departments of 12 provinces and centrally-run cities.
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| Senior Colonel Le Thom delivers opening remarks. |
Delivering his opening speech, Senior Colonel Le Thom started that illegal trafficking and consumption of rare wild animals was not seen only on a small scale but there were illegal wildlife trafficking transnational networks and organizations with the participation of domestic and foreign subjects. They illegally transported a large amount of wildlife across borders.
Recently, wildlife traffickers began to make use of cyberspace and internet banking to carry out online transactions in an effort to avoid law enforcement forces.
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| Ms. Tricia Tan speaks at the opening ceremony. |
In response to this type of non-traditional criminal methods, law enforcement officers need to be comprehensively trained so they can have updated knowledge and skills to detect and investigate methods and tricks of the wildlife traffickers, contributing to preventing and stopping wildlife trafficking in the region and world.
The Deputy Director also appreciated the effective coordination of the INTERPOL Environmental Security Unit with the Vietnamese environmental police force over the past time, suggesting that the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and the INTERPOL Environmental Security Unit should establish a liaison mechanism to effectively exchange information between the two agencies, contributing to improving the efficiency of preventing and combating wildlife-related offenses.
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| Delegates join group photo. |
The training course is slated till November 15th.
The training course aims to build up investigation capacity of Vietnamese police officers in charge of preventing and controlling wildlife trafficking, as well as give them guidance to the investigation of online wildlife trafficking cases and equip them with skills to track digital transactions, effectively explore open information sources in cyberspace in support of their investigation.