KUALA LUMPUR: An updated tracking mechanism has been put in place to increase the efficiency of locating missing children, Home Ministry said today.
Deputy Home Minister Datuk Masir Kujat said National Urgent Response (NUR) Alert that was launched since 2010, has helped eased the police's effort in finding missing and kidnapped children.
"In 2016, we made improvements to the system and the police are now collaborating with Facebook and launched a new service to help locate missing children in Malaysia.
"The NUR Alert system, developed by Facebook with input from the police, will alert users with information via their news feed when children are reported as missing.
"This has enabled police to reach a wider audience and allowed immediate dissemination of information on any missing children’s cases," he said, in reply to a question posed by senator Tan Sri S. Nallakaruppan on missing children's statistics.
Masir today revealed that as of 2016, out of 1,803 total missing children below the age 18, 907 of them have been found while 824 are still deemed as missing.
"This figure shows more than half of the missing children have been located and proves the efficiency of the system we have put in place.
"From 2012 to 2016, we managed to solve 10 reported kidnapped for ransom cases involving children where eight of them have been rescued, one murdered and one drowned," he said.
Masir added that social media has proven to be a useful tool in keeping up with technology advancement hence allowing the police to improve their search methods.
Malaysia is the first country in Asia to collaborate with Facebook on such a system, and the eighth
in the world.
"We are now able to reach outside of Malaysia in countries like Singapore for instance." he said.