2010-06-30

New thermal imaging cameras to help control frontier better

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The borderline is being reinforced as the State Border Guard Service (SBGS) has acquired 19 new portable thermal imaging cameras with European Union funds. The state-of-the-art night vision hardware has been supplied to the border guards by the company Fima.

“Border trespassers are becoming increasingly ingenious and therefore we have to develop continuously and use the latest equipment to be one step ahead of the criminals. The SBGS uses portable thermal imaging cameras, which have served their purpose, and a decision was made to purchase another dozen or so of similar devices,” says Arvydas Kerbelis, the director of the Technical Department of the SBGS’s Infrastructure Development Board.

In his words, from now on a much larger number of border guards can be equipped with thermal imaging facilities, as due to the lower-than-expected price the SBGS could afford to buy quite a few more of the modern devices in a tender procedure.

The State Border Guard Service got an offer from the company Fima of the of supreme quality thermal imaging cameras from the US company Flir. “The night-vision equipment from this company is very compact and light and has a very long range of detection. Border guards will find it very convenient to carry this equipment around on a day-to-day basis and to control trespassing movement at the frontier,” says Giedrius Zaicevas, the director of the Security Solutions Department of Fima.

Today, specialists from Fima instructed border guards on using the new facilities.

The procurement project for thermal imaging cameras cost the SBGS LTL 499,985 and was funded with financial resources within the framework of the annual programme for the year 2008 of the European Commission External Borders Fund. Under the 2007 – 2013 External Borders Fund Programme, Lithuanian border guards will be funded with EUR 54 million for various measures.

Additional info:

The purpose of the External Borders Fund is to help organise checks and surveillance of external borders and manage flows of people at external borders in an efficient way, to ensure that border guards across the EU apply provisions of the law regulating the crossing of borders in a consistent way, improve the activities of consular establishments of the Member States based in the third countries aimed at controlling flows of the third countries citizens.