Judicial, crime investigators trained in cybercrime case management

Sep 19, 2014

With the increasing cases of cybercrime in Uganda, officials from the chain of justice institutions have been trained in special computer skills to effectively handle the cases at various levels

By Jeff Andrew Lule 

With the increasing cases of cybercrime in Uganda, officials from the chain of justice institutions have been trained in special computer skills to effectively handle the cases at various levels.

The three day training which ended on Wednesday follows a Memorandum of Understanding signed last year between Ugandan and Danish government to equip judicial officials and criminal investigators with special skills in handling computer crime.

While closing the training, the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP), Mike Kibita said computer fraud is very complicated and all officers need to be equipped with special expertise to handle the new wave of crime.

Kibita said the main challenges for cybercrime is that evidence is never available in traditional formats and it takes special training and expertise to build it up.

He said cybercrime is very serious and a new frontier for corruption.

“Cybercrime is a new wave of corruption. Now people use computers to transfer money from one account to another. That is what happened in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) and Pension scandals. Everything is computerized,” he noted.

The training was held under the theme; “Fighting Corruption and Abuse of Office”, supported by Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), organized by the Inspectorate of Government (IG), at Lake Victoria Serena Hotel, in Wakiso district.

Kibita said lack of special expertise in cybercrime is one reason many cases take long to be concluded due to lack of concrete evidence to pin the culprits.

“There is what they call compute imaging after transfer of money which needs extraordinary computer expertise to dig deep into the computers to get evidence. This has been our challenge,” he noted.

The training was attended by officers from the IG, DPP’s office, Criminal Intelligence and Investigations Directorate (CIID) and Judiciary among others.

He said the National Information Technology Authority  (NITA) is also training different government agencies running critical IT infrastructure in areas of Incident handling, Computer Forensics & Malware Analysis to ensure the growth of those special skills.

Ahssan Mohamed, the deputy DPP Denmark, said they want to strengthen the prosecution and law enforcement services to easily prosecute corrupt officials.

Officials were also trained in investigative technics, evidence obtaining, searches, management of scenes of crime and asset tracing among others.

About, the Katosi road fraud case, Kibita said it is one of the most complicate cases. “Fraud and investigations are taking place at the same as road construction works continue. It is quite complicated but we are only waiting for the file to take it on,” he added.
 

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});