Navrongo (UER) Sept. 5, GNA Immigration Officials in the Upper East Region have been asked to be more vigilant and look out for people who enter the country to perpetuate crime.

"All sorts of criminal acts including cyber fraud are on the increase and need to be controlled and to a large extent reduced so that the country can maintain its reputation of good hospitality, peaceful and investor friendly," Mr. Peter Defie Regional Director of Immigration said on Saturday.

The Director, who was addressing 50 immigration officers at Navrongo in the Kassena Nankena District at the end of a three day workshop on "Countering Document Fraud and Intelligence Gathering", said the officers were being trained and equipped to enable them to detect fraudulent documents, illegal and unwanted materials at all the entry points in the region.

Mr. Emmanuel Andema, District Chief Executive, urged the officers to be committed to their work and collaborate with other security agencies to enhance national security.

Speaking on diseases that could easily spread from one country to the other, Mr. Andema called on the officers to be alert and report all cases suspected to be HINI influenza to the health facilities for the patients to be kept under surveillance and treated.

He expressed concern that HIV/AIDS was highly prevalent in the district, saying the test carried out on 320 persons this year, showed that 90 of them were HIV and Hepatitis B positive as compared to the 17 people who turned out to positive from the 242 people tested for the same disease last year.

Mr. Kwabena Somuah Amponsah, Deputy Superintendent, Immigration, who led a team of seven facilitators at the workshop, explained that the service saw the need to improve the skills of the personnel and equip them with modern tools to be able to carry out their work efficiently, hence the training programme, which would be carried out in all the 10 regions.

He said the officers were trained to enhance security to be able to detect security features in documents, passenger assessment, impostor detection, document examination and the identification of the new birth certificate and the national identity card.

The training programme, called the Aeneas Programme, is being sponsored by the European Union Commission and would eventually set up a National Document Expertise Centre in Accra for the training of all immigration officers to improve their skills and empower them to meet new challenges. Mr. Amponsah presented modern equipment for documentation and currency detection to the Regional Director, to be used at all the entry points in the region. 05 Sept. 09