Indo-US meet to discuss issue of coordination among agencies

Lack of coordination among various security agencies in handling terror cases will be one of the topics to be discussed at the two-day Indo-US Homeland Security meet beginning tomorrow.
The conference, which will be inaugurated by Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, will have a presentation on responses to mass causality events with the Hyderabad blast on February 21 being cited as an example.
"There was no proper coordination between the various investigation agencies such as CID, CI Cell, NIA, Octopus. Each agency started picking up evidences from the scene," the presentation, which is being made for the meet, said.
"Information or evidence collected by various agencies (State as well as Centre) were not shared with the local police or with each other.

"Each agency wanted to single handedly investigate the offence and detect the case. Proper coordination, which is very essential and important in detection of such crime, was lacking among the agencies," it said.
The presentation also highlights the heavy rush of VIPs to the area where crime has taken place and said these visits also put an additional burden and stress on local officers.
Preserving the crime scene is of utmost importance in cases related to terror incidents and despite putting a senior officer in charge of the site, in which 19 people were killed, the crime was disturbed by curious onlookers, print and electronic media and continuous visit of the VIPs.

The presentation also spoke about ill-equipped hospitals which were unable to cater to such an incident and late arrival of ambulances to the scene because of heavy traffic rush.