CSI Dubai staff are given cutting edge

Forensic chemistry assistant Salama bin Ghelaitah is one of the many female staff members who work at Dubai’s General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology. Alex Atack for The National

DUBAI // Every day, Capt Anoud Ahmed Al Saadi arrives early for the 7.30am start to her shift – and she often returns to work in the evening.

The expert assistant in toxicology at Dubai’s General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology, says that working hours do not matter when a person loves their job.

“I’m always so excited to come to work and, sometimes, even come back in the evening to learn the results of a certain case,” she says. “We are always reachable and our phones are always on, because we are on call 24 hours a day.”

Last month, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, opened the state-of-the-art forensics building, which you can be forgiven for thinking is a five-star hotel.

Capt Al Saadi, 36, has been working with Dubai Police for 13 years and says her daily routine includes checking urine samples for traces of drugs.

“On a daily basis, we get samples from the anti-narcotics department as part of a two-year programme that monitors recovering drug addicts,” she says. “There is a complete confidentiality policy, and we don’t know to whom the samples belong. What we have is a number, not a name.

“Within an hour, we have a positive or negative result. If it’s a positive result, we do further tests for confirmation.”

Another part of her daily routine is testing blood for alcohol.

“A person is given a breathalyser test and, if there is a positive result, he is taken to the relevant police station, where a blood sample is taken and then brought to us,” she says. That process needs to be quick, Capt Al Saadi says, because alcohol levels change in a matter of hours.

She also says that her job involves postmortem toxicology tests.

“We check for any drugs, in case of an overdose, and poisons,” she says adding that a toxicology report is needed before a pathologist can conduct his work and, in some cases, prosecutors need it too.

Col Ahmad Al Muheiri, director of the department, says he is proud and honoured to be part of the new and improved Dubai Police unit.

“There was an increase in employees, an increase in cases and increase in population,” he says, “so the previous place was no longer enough.”

Dubai Police chief Maj Gen Khamis Al Muzeina was tasked with studying the forensics expansion project.

“We had a team that went to the US and the UK to visit the world’s top police forensic labs, where we listened to the employees about their achievements and obstacles,” Col Al Muheiri says. His department includes more than 250 employees and, after the expansion project was started in 2008, building began in 2012 and the building became their new home this year.

There are plans to add more employees and hire Emiratis who are still studying, Col Al Muheiri says.

“We have about 65 Emirati students studying abroad,” he says. “And our staff is almost 50 per cent female. When I first started, there were only two women working with us.”

An expert assistant at the digital forensic unit, Shaima Al Mazrouei, 27, says part of her job is to investigate items retrieved from crime scenes. “We deal with everything from phones to computers. We extract the information and record everything for a final report, which includes our conclusion,” she says.

She can work on cases for anything from two to three days to a few weeks.

Ms Al Mazrouei says that the report is co-signed by the director and then transferred to the relevant authority, which sometimes includes prosecutors.

“Depending on the case, one of the co-signatories may need to testify in court,” she says.