The Hindu : New Delhi News : Dog squad losing teeth

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 09, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Dog squad losing teeth

A Delhi police dog undergoing training.

NEW DELHI, AUG 8. It was a scene straight out of the movies. A gruesome double murder, a mysterious slipper found at the scene of the crime and some stumped policemen.

Help came within hours in the form of two tracker dogs of Delhi Police, who sniffed the slipper and ran straight to a nearby house and started barking at some discarded clothes, thus identifying the culprit leading to his arrest.

The role of the police dogs was pivotal in solving the murder case in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in April this year, but sadly, such successes have become rare in Delhi itself.

Police blame the heat and pollution in the Capital, coupled with the increasing use of vehicles by criminals to get away from the scene of the crime.

``Our dogs can track the culprits only till the spot where they have got into vehicles as their scent disappears after that,'' an official of the dog squad says.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime and Railways) Tajendra Luthra says the heat and pollution cause the scent to disappear quickly in the capital, because of which tracker dogs sometimes fail to pick it up.

Perhaps this is why the dog squad of Delhi Police today has more canines trained to sniff out explosives and narcotics than tracker dogs. Of the 52 Doberman Pinchers, Labradors and German Shephards with the squad, 33 are explosive sniffers, two are for narcotics, two for search and rescue and 15 are trackers.

Of them, 13 are with the Crime Branch while the others have been distributed among local and Metro Rail police units.

Each of the nine police districts in the capital has one tracker dog and two sniffer dogs for explosives, the latter attached to the bomb disposal squads. ``The detection of bombs, narcotics and search and rescue operations at times of disaster are the main areas of operation in which dogs are used. Dogs are only to help in investigations, not to work out cases,'' says Luthra.

The explosive sniffer dogs have notched up several successes in the last few years, including the discovery of 21 kilograms of gelatine sticks at New Delhi Railway Station by a bitch named Naina on August 30, 2003.

In the run-up to the Independence Day, almost all of them have been pressed into service to sanitise the Red Fort, from the ramparts of which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will address the nation on August 15, and its surrounding areas.

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