GUJRAT: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) will help the police establish a women and juvenile facilitation centre at the Police Lines as well as an information technology lab for the training of police station-level investigation officers on collecting forensic evidence from crime scenes.

The funds for both these projects will be provided by a European nation through its embassy in Islamabad to the UNODC that will act as an executing agencyin this regard.

Official sources said that once the facilitation centre was established, women and juveniles locked up in police stations across the district would be shif ted there until their cases were being investigated. The aim to establish such a centre was to keep these vulnerable segments of society away from the environment of a police station.

Sub-Inspector Hassan Askari, the head of the police`s crime scene unit, told Dawn that the IT lab was meant to facilitate investigation officers in collecting evidence from crime scenes, as currently the unit was working only on district level and incase of need the unit would have to move anywhere in the district in a van carrying all the equipment.

However, he said, only a fewofficials had the knowhow about collecting evidence from the crime scene and officials at police station level should be trained for the purpose. Almost all police stations had the required gadgets, but lacked professional training to operate them.

Mr Askari was the sole official to be initially trained by the UNODC in collecting and preserving forensic evidence, and later he trained a few more officials to assist him at the unit.

Both these projects were already approved and the required funding was said to be in process.

Earlier, in 2014-15, the Norwegian government, through the UNODC, had provided financial assistance for the establishment of crime scene units for Rs5 million on the recommendations of the then district police officer Rai Ijaz Ahmed.

The establishment of another IT lab is said to be continuation of the existing crime scene unit that was working. Its operations were consistently monitored by the UNODC since its establishment here.