Travellers arriving in the Caribbean for the cricket World Cup should be prepared for some MIND control. They should not, though, fear some bizarre plot to alter people's behaviour using covert drug tests or electronic signals.
MIND, which stands for Mobile Integrated Network Data, is a security system developed by the international police agency Interpol to identify potential threats.
Interpol will be relying on it to screen passengers arriving in any of the nine countries hosting the two-month tournament, which begins with an opening ceremony in Jamaica on March 11.
The ninth World Cup is being staged for the first time on the doorstep of the United States and with travellers pouring in from countries such as Pakistan at a time of growing radical sentiment and anti-Americanism, security is paramount.
The fact the Cup will be played in so many venues - Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago - could make security especially tricky.
Trinidad and Tobago, in particular, is the only country in the western hemisphere to have witnessed an Islamic rebellion.
Interpol's secretary-general, Ron Noble, told Reuters in a recent interview he has had a team in place in the West Indies since October 1 to co-ordinate security.
Led by a large contingent of police from South Africa, which hosted the last cricket World Cup in 2003, the Interpol team has secured an abundant supply of bomb-sniffing dogs and metal or weapons detection devices. Noble said MIND - which will be used for the first time at a sports event - would allow host country officials to screen the passports of international airline or cruise ship passengers and check them against Interpol's global database within four seconds.
The database lists some 13 million passports or other travel documents that have been lost or stolen, along with information on more than 10,000 people on security watch lists. "We know stolen passports are being used to engage in people trafficking, to engage in support of terrorist activities," said Noble.
Among other tools, Noble said Interpol would also be getting passenger information from a database called the Advance Passenger Information System. The information will be transmitted to Interpol even before a plane carrying a potential threat takes off for the Caribbean. He acknowledged, however, that security officials faced a potential threat from "home-grown terrorists".
Imam Yasin Abu Bakr of Trinidad and Tobago and members of his organisation, the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen, staged the western hemisphere's only Islamic revolt in July 1990.
Twenty-four people died in a six-day coup attempt led by Abu Bakr, who returned to the spotlight last December when he was exonerated after a murder conspiracy trial unrelated to the coup.
"There are certainly people in Trinidad who could do that sort of thing," said Harry Brandon, a former FBI counter-terrorism expert, when asked whether the twin-island nation of 1.3 million people posed a special threat during the World Cup.
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