GWANDU UNVEILS PLANS TO END KIDNAPPING
Acting Executive Vice Chairman/CEO of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr Bashir Gwandu, yesterday in Abuja unveiled plans to reduce the menace of kidnapping in the country using telecommunications devices.
Kidnapping has become a serious menace in Nigeria over the last one year most especially in the South-East and South-South geopolitical zones of the country.
Drawing from one of his short, medium and long term plans to move the telecom industry forward, which he presented at a meeting with chief executives of telecom operators in Lagos recently, Gwandu said that one of such plans could significantly curtail or even eliminate the menace of kidnapping in the country.
He said while SIM Card registration offers significant solution to the issue of kidnapping, another project that could complement Sim-card registration is a plan to issue subsidy to operators to install equipment on every mast and tower that could be used for triangulating between sites in order to identify real-geographical location of both GPS and none GPS-enabled mobile handsets.
Gwandu stated that in addition to the triangulation project, all GPS-enabled handsets can also be tracked by low earth orbit satellites. He further stated that there are other equipment that could be deployed to tractk and identify the locations of handsets being used to solicit for ransom. According to Gwandu, once ownership of numbers can be identified, mobile phones can be tracked, and their geographical locations become identifiable, then, any call made to solicit for ransom will help to locate the kidnappers.
Decrying the problems of none registration of SIM cards, Dr. said: 'With just about N1000 a multitude of crimes can be committed by purchasing multiple Sim-cards and fraudulently using them to threaten others via voice or text messages and also committing other phone-assisted crimes. 'This has to stop, and we are working hard to stop it,' he said.
To curtail the phone assisted crimes, Engr. Gwandu said the Sim-card registration will not only help to identify the owners of Mobile phone-numbers but the data-base to be created will allow for pictures of criminals captured on CCTV or other cameras to be compared with and be searched in the phone users data-base for facial identification of criminals. He also explained that the Sim-card registration can help in national-planning as well as for identification of criminals anywhere, anytime.