Sheikh Saif attend presentation by Metropolitan Police on London terror strikes
29/1/2006
His highness Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan ,Minister of Interior and Senior Police officers along with many other Police personnel’s have attended a presentation at the General Headquarters of Abu Dhabi Police on London terror attacks occurred in July last year.
The presentation was conducted by the Commander David Johnston and Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghafoor of the special crime detachment of the London Metropolitan Police.
The presentation included the video clippings of the incidents and many other footages and graphic representations of the investigation and disaster management carried out by the Metropolitan Police.
The presentation was aimed at exchanging operational experience of the Metropolitan Police in various aspects of terrorist attacks, its investigation and recovery management system.
Talking at the presentation, Tarique Gaffor stressed the importance of involving the international community in exchanging information and intelligence in preventing and investigating such incidence.
He touched various important measures to be taken to preempt the attacks and also other steps to be taken at various stages of the investigation and recovery management.
Importance of intelligence, technology, community involvement and media management
The London attack occurred on July 7the in the underground metro rail at three different places and inside a bus killing many and injuring a lot of people. The terrorist struck again on 21st of July.
He explained the experience they had in handling such surprise attacks and stressed the importance of intelligence ,using of technology like close circuit televisions ,fingerprints ,DNA retrieval and follow up action.
The investigation that followed, he said was the biggest single manhunt done by the Metropolitan Police in its history. The entire incident was digitally recreated, numbers of video footages were examined, other evidences were colleted and few arrests were made not later than July 27th he said.
Explaining the operational experience, the commander David Johnston cited the importance of community involvement and proper media management at the time of incident and at various stages of investigations and recovery management.
The Metropolitan Police have about 40,000 Police personals and 32,000officers and all were engaged in handling the situation especially dealing with various communities. He said.
Creation of a proper public information system is very important in dealing with the recovery management he said .The Metropolitan Police have set up a strategic crisis management program to deal with such situations, which was digitally presented to the audience including the methodology of its effective operation in handling the injured and dead persons, documentation of evidence for further investigation, casuality management, and the working of the command and control system.
The big issues he said was the preparedness to face such events, managing complacency, community intelligence and Global cooperation.
The participants were given sufficient opportunity to interact with the Metropolitan Police officers and have answered many of their queries pertaining to terro
