LYON, France - Indonesia has invited INTERPOL to help co-ordinate international disaster victim identification efforts following the earthquake and tsunami which killed more than 150,000 people in Asia on 26 December.

An INTERPOL Incident Response Team will leave from the General Secretariat in Lyon immediately for Banda Aceh, where it will help Indonesian authorities to assess what is required and to set up secure communications between the field and the INTERPOL network to support the disaster victim identification effort.

Indonesia was hardest hit by the disaster, with tens of thousands killed and many more thousands of people missing.

The deployment of the team to Indonesia is part of INTERPOL's ongoing response to the disaster in the region. An Incident Response Team is already on the ground in Phuket, Thailand, where it is providing logistical and communications support to Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) teams from more than two dozen of INTERPOL's member countries.

Senior police officials from 26 countries who gathered at the INTERPOL General Secretariat on 5 January agreed on series of steps to further support disaster victim identification efforts and to address related law enforcement issues.

The meeting endorsed Secretary General Ronald K. Noble's proposal to immediately create a Crisis Management Support Group, consisting of INTERPOL staff and officials from member countries, to assist in the co-ordination and support of international disaster victim identification efforts in Asia.

Last week's tsunami disaster prompted the largest ever deployment of DVI teams by INTERPOL member countries and the largest effort of this kind by INTERPOL's Command and Co-ordination Centre in Lyon.

Secretary General Noble traveled to Phuket on 31 December 2004 to make a first hand assessment of the additional support needed for the DVI teams there. He will make similar fact-finding trips to Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives next week.