We will continue backing fight on crime, FBI Director says

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Director Christopher Wray has committed to continue backing the Joint Terrorism Taskforce (JTTF).

The task force was created to help Kenya bring together all agencies involved in fighting crime for collaboration.

According to Wray, when the FBI piloted the programme in the US it proved to be a success and hence it was rolled out to other parts of the world with Kenya being the first country where it was established outside the US.

“The JTTF model is based on the idea that expertise in any one government or country are more effective when we work together,” said Wray.

He said that the idea behind JTTF is to capitalize on the different agencies' expertise, experience, intelligence, and sources and put them together rather than have some parts doing their own thing.

“The best way to make it happen is to have agencies at the working level across agencies that trust each other, collaborating and sharing information in a way where action can be taken that maximizes the authorities of every agency to impact the threat.”

He said that the FBI was eager to deepen their working relationship with agencies here in Kenya to help JTTF achieve the goal of collaboration for success.

“We are encouraged by some of the things we have seen and we are looking forward to great things ahead.”

According to Wray the JTTF took off after the 9/11 terrorist attacks since it showed why collaboration was important in tackling the threat of terrorism.

“Now in the US we have JTTF’s in all our field offices all across the country but we have also taken that same model to deal with all sorts of other types of threats too.”

DCI boss Mohammed Amin said Kenya’s JTTF leverages on the expertise and capacities of various ministries, department and agencies represented.

“As a country we have seen the benefits of JTTF and the idea dawned on us after the 1998 US Embassy bombing, the Westgate attack and Dusit D2 attack whereby various security agencies were operating in silos.”

He said that the idea to bring them all together to be an one stop shop had brought success in stopping crimes majorly among them being thwarting terror attacks.