The Japan Coast Guard held an online forensics training for officials of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) in cooperation with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the National University of Malaysia (UKM) in order to improve their forensic skills further as a part of initial crime investigation procedures from October 26 to 28, 2021.

MMEA officials who are in charge of forensic investigation and shipboard officers involved in initial investigation procedures participated in the training. The Japan Coast Guard officials, MMEA forensic experts and UKM professors gave lectures on the basic knowledge and skills regarding the forensics.

At the training, the MMEA forensic instructors lectured about ways of taking pictures and fingerprint collection, and shared some crime cases investigated by MMEA. The professor of UKM taught important points for evidence preservation and analysis methods while showing actual cases of drugs smuggling, robberies, gun-fights.　

Japan Coast Guard gave a lecture on methods of extracting necessary information for investigation from electrical equipment such as radar and electronic charts related to crimes, and also introduced operations of the Japan Coast Guard Research Center which appraises evidence materials of marine crimes gathered from all over Japan.

Like this, the training could achieve improvement of the forensic skills of MMEA staff, which was the main purpose of the training, through sharing knowledge and experiences of both Malaysia and Japan, and also deepened understandings of mutual forensic operations through active exchange of opinions as well as Q and A.

While we could not include direct practical instructions as the training was an online session due to Covid-19, by applying advantage of online it could extend lectures not only to total 70 of MMEA participants but also to observers who attended from coast guards of other Asian countries.

Japan Coast Guard will continue to cooperate and coordinate with coast guards of various countries to strengthen maritime safety and security and move forward to accomplish the"Free and Open Indo-Pacific".