Criminal Investigation

The Central Criminal Investigation Department (DCIC) is PCIC’s operational core and its largest unit by staff, concentrating around 63% of the institution’s total personnel. It is the department responsible for conducting investigations into serious, complex, and organised crime, acting under the functional direction of the Public Prosecution Service and in close coordination with case prosecutors at every stage of the criminal investigation.

DCIC’s material competence covers a broad set of offences expressly defined in the PCIC Organic Law, including crimes against life, kidnapping and abduction, trafficking in persons and human organs, aggression and sexual exploitation, criminal association, crimes against State security, robbery and arson, aggravated and computer fraud, bribery and corruption, forgery of documents and currency, money laundering and tax fraud, and drug trafficking. The Prosecutor-General may also delegate to DCIC the investigation of any other crime which, by its complexity, value at stake, or social alarm, justifies it.

The conduct of each investigation involves rigorous procedural management that combines the collection of evidence at the crime scene - in coordination with the Criminalistics Laboratory - the carrying out of surveillance and searches, the arrest of suspects, the questioning of witnesses and defendants, and the preparation of the procedural records required for the trial phase. DCIC also acts in criminal-prevention operations, developing action plans targeted at the most prevalent forms of crime and at emerging threats, in particular the increasing use of computer means for committing crimes.

The quality of investigations rests on the highly specialised training of investigators, which covers criminal and procedural law, criminal-investigation methodologies, professional ethics, and forensic techniques. PCIC has set as a strategic objective the consolidation of DCIC as the national reference in judicial investigation, complementing the other criminal-police bodies operating in Timor-Leste.