IMTs' Success Impacts the Security and Health of Local Communities

6 February 2020, Tashkent, Uzbekistan - The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Regional Office for Central Asia handed over a forensic mobile minivan for investigation of drug-related crimes and 33 units of Inspection borescopes for law enforcement agencies of the Republic of Uzbekistan to further support the implementation of Interagency Mobile Teams initiative (IMTs). 

"Setting up the IMTs in Uzbekistan allowed the creation of a successful operative cooperation platform between different law enforcement agencies, which ensures planning and organization of joint operations go quicker and smoother, and the investigations are done based on best experience of each involved agency. All the work that you do through the Teams, is truly impacting health and security of communities." - highlighted Ms. Ashita Mittal, UNODC Regional Representative for Central Asia.

The Interagency Mobile Teams initiative is the UNODC's flagship program in Uzbekistan on countering trafficking of Afghan narcotics, which introduced new approaches by promoting counter-narcotics cooperation between UNODC ROCA and the Government of Uzbekistan, with funding support by the Government of Japan.

"As a part of the new regional cooperation initiative that we are about to launch, we would like to ask Uzbekistan to play a key role in coordination with other countries and expand their good work to the region." - noted Ms. Yoko Yamoto, the First Secretary of the Embassy of Japan in Uzbekistan.

A forensic mobile minivan for investigation of drug-related crimes will be used by the IMTs to support counter-narcotics operations in all regains of Uzbekistan. It is the asset to be used when a second phase of IMT initiative is launched in March 2020 in order to scale up its scope to cover all other regions of Uzbekistan and give an impetus towards developing its regional aspect in terms of sharing best practices with other countries of the Central Asian region.

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