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Guwahati, March 16: When crime goes hi-tech, it takes more than a Sherlock Holmes to crack it.

In cyberspace, especially, the “footprints” left by criminals are hard to find and takes special eyes to scan the crime scene for clues.

The Special Task Force (STF) of Assam police will soon have a “state-of-the-art” cyber crime investigation laboratory to help crack crimes committed using cyberspace and mobile phones.

The proposed laboratory — to be set up as part of the modernisation scheme for the police force — will have equipment for email tracing, mobile phone data extraction and analysis, password recovery, email database analysis, data recovery from deleted files and SIM card reading.

The Assam police now have to depend on Forensic Science Laboratory for cyber crime investigation.

“The laboratory will help the police identify and understand crimes with technological support. The facility could also be used to train law-enforcement personnel and understand the technological aspects and their use in crime,” a police source said.

It will be equipped with a voice biometric system, which will conduct forensic analysis of voice samples of suspects and criminals which will help compile expert reports as validated evidence in court.

The source said such a laboratory is mandatory since terrorists, militants and even antisocials have been using emails and Internet chat rooms to communicate among themselves, receive instructions and commit crimes.

“Increasing use of information technology facilities like Internet and mobile telephones was making our task very difficult. Computer literacy was no longer enough to deal with crimes and the police would have to learn how to investigate cyber crimes,” he said.

In October last year, the Special Task Force, which deals with cyber crimes, had registered a case after a city-based lawyer, who received an email for recruitment as a jihadi from an unknown sender, lodged a complaint. The email asked the recipient, Ajoy Hazarika, to attend military training in Afghanistan to wage jihad.

A source said the Assam police have been scouting for competent parties for supply of equipment, training, installation and commissioning of the laboratory and the cost of the projects is being worked out.

He said cyber crimes, particularly against women on social networking sites, data theft and hacking are on the rise in the state.

The laboratory would be able to identify and recover permanently deleted and encrypted information from email database and also be able to process all languages and character sets including Hindi, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Cyrillic and Arabic.

“It will provide an easy-to-use data extraction solution for mobile phones with more than 1,700-handset support, including CDMA, GSM, TDMA, iDen cell phones, PDAs, satellite phones and GPS devices,” he said.

“The system will also have dedicated devices (sensors) for monitoring airspace and a centralised server that analyses the data received from sensors,” he added.