On June 28, Vitebsk / Diana Kurilo - BELTA /. Approximately 72 million records are held in the Interstate Information Bank, established to assist in the search for suspects and missing persons within the CIS countries, the Information and Public Relations Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus informed a BELTA correspondent. The entire array of centralized operational-reference, forensic and wanted records, as well as statistical and archival information, is concentrated in the Interstate Information Bank. Its formation and use are carried out by the Ministries of Internal Affairs of the CIS member states. One of the most in-demand is the record of persons declared wanted internationally. This database contains data on over 1.6 million individuals. Thanks to the use of this information in 2011 and the first quarter of the current year, over 3.5 thousand criminals were detained within the territories of states that were not the initiators of the search, and the whereabouts of 779 missing persons were established. In the first quarter of the current year, the Ministries of Internal Affairs of Belarus and Russia switched to a unified data exchange format for keeping records of wanted persons. This has enabled prompt information exchange and the abandonment of paper-based records. -0-

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