• The directorate fully equipped to deal with criminals involved in child exploitation
• The wing will enable Kinoti to seize criminals who have resorted to hiding distant parts of the country
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations is now fully equipped to deal with child exploitation criminals.
Yesterday, DCI George Kinoti said they would decentralise to the farthest regions in the country to deal with those who exploited children.
"We now have the means to collect evidence that is watertight and cannot be easily penetrated by the defence because we have previously lost cases due to loopholes in the evidence collected,"Kinoti said.
He Kinoti was addressing the opening of the cyber wing of the Anti-human Trafficking Child Protection Unit at the DCI Academy.
He said that the wing would enable his office to capture criminals who hid in interior parts of the country like Turkana and Marsabit.
"These kinds of criminals have high stakes economically and they have now moved to regions such as Turkana in the name of helping the children there and the things they do to them are terrible," Kinoti said.
"If possible, we will decentralise to police stations all over the county to deal with such cases."
The DCI warned that those who used culture to exploit the rights of children that they would not be spared.
Kenya is the first country in the continent to open the cyber wing facility. More units will be set up in Mombasa and Kisumu.
The facility is equipped with technologies that will ease forensic investigations and collection of evidence.
"Forensic experts will have around seven to eight computers which will be used to analyse phones and computers of suspected paedophiles," Kevin Lay, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Law Enforcement adviser said.
"The equipment that we have is able within a very short period of time to identify whether there are indecent images or videos of children.
"The evidence is then presented to the Director of Public Prosecutions who directs on whether or not they charge the suspect.
A full forensic examination is conducted at the new cyber unit of the CID headquarters.
"The equipment that we have will however help reduce the duration of time which is around 10 to 12 days to perform full forensic examinations at the DCI so we have something to present to the DPP," Lay said.
Further, the wing will be directly linked to the International Child Exploitation database hosted by Interpol which contain millions of videos and images.
"We will use the database to compare the existing images to images we collect in the forensic room. The database will tell us whether those images have been used before," he said.
"This will help forensic investigators identify whether the victim in the images or video has been found and safeguarded and is no longer being exploited.
"Where we identify that we don't know those images or videos, we then call together all the people from the victim identification network across the globe and those images and videos will be seen by those people," he said.
"Together they will look at miniature details in them to see whether we can identify initially which country we are looking at."
The investigations are fine-tuned by looking at unique details in the images or videos to see if exact locations of the victims can be identified.