By: Mariama Njie
Security officials of the Gambia Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) including officers of the immigration and police have completed an 8-day capacity building training on documenting, profiling, identifying and intercepting of human trafficking cases.
The training that aimed to enhance the security officials on the border control in the airport was organized by Estonian Police and funded by the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Speaking at the closing ceremony of the weeklong training, Mr Sten Boder, head of Estonian Police said the training’s best feedbacks comes from the trainees that they have a very good experience sharing in terms of detecting out unauthentic documents, how to spot human trafficking (traffickers) and how to deal with them further.
“The trainees selected from various departments at the airport include the immigration department, who are responsible for document of people traveling in and out of The Gambia, participants from the Police Force and the Civil Aviation Authority as well,” he added.
He urged participants to make good use of the skill learned during the training.
The training carried out is very important for both the European Union and The Gambia, we don’t want human trafficking and smuggling we want to have reliable documents, he added.
Also, acting Director of Human Resource at GCAA, Fatou Jallow said “the training has enhanced our believed at the GCAA that together we can mitigate the fraud documents and smuggling of persons in our industry. Therefore it is imperative that we the participants should take the lessons learned from the training seriously and our best in implementing it.”
She commended the European Union and the Estonia government for the support.
Meanwhile, Commission Pateh Jallow who spoke on behalf of the Inspector General of Police said the training is timely as the world is facing a lot of security challenges. “We commended the Estonian Police for enhancing the skills of security operations of The Gambia in the area of documenting, profiling and identifying crimes.”
However, the closing ceremony was punctuated with presentation of certificates to 27 participants.