Participants at a ports safety and security seminar would now be able to identify suspicious people arriving at Fiji Ports.

The 20 participants had enhanced their knowledge gained during the four-day port facility security assessments and ports facility security plans seminar. The seminar ended on Thursday.

The training was organized by Maritime Safety Authority of Fiji (MSAF) in collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security.

It was facilitated by a four-member team from the US Coast Guard with 20 participants from the Fiji Ports, Ministry of Commerce, Trade, Tourism and Transport and Maritime Safety Authority of Fiji.

US Coast Guard, Lieutenant-Commander Christopher Schleck, said the seminar was mostly to set up a plan on how to implement security.

“We taught participants lessons on how to keep port facilities secure and make sure that nothing is getting into the maritime supply chain,” Lieutenant-Commander Schleck said.

“Primarily, the focus of this seminar is something called the International Ships and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code.

“That is primarily anti-terrorist, but when a facility is implementing anti-terrorism measures across the globe, we see good improvements in other things that are not the focus like stopping drugs, illegal immigration, and human trafficking.

“We did training on capacity-building, especially on identifying suspicious activities and suspicious persons.

“We are looking at the behaviour base and we talked about identifying what normal behaviour looks like and what abnormal behavior looks like.”

MSAF officer in charge Captain Sesoni Komaisoso said participants learned a lot from the seminar and hoped they would implement what they have learned.

“The seminar is about port safety measures and security plans, especially on how it is implemented. We have a role to play,” Captain Komaisoso said.