Special Telecommunications Service (STS) First Deputy, Brigadier General Sorin Balan, told the hearings in the Chamber’s Defence Committee on Monday that the Service didn’t supply the three wrong addresses to the Police, as in the case of the calls initiated from a mobile phone, the information is graphic, a postal address being only available in the case of land phones.
“We don’t supply postal addresses for the specialized intervention agencies, except for the situations when the call to 112 is made from a land phone line. We didn’t supply the three addresses. We cannot. I want to inform you that the location information taken over from the mobile operators is displayed in a graphic format both at the STS operator and at all the other agencies, the Police included. We didn’t supply addresses. (…) Accessing the location information was available in the system since the first call – 11,05 – and opening the location app for the first time at the police operator was done at 12,08. There were requests of the police operator to ensure support on using the app for visualising the information projection, which was done, (…) the last [support] being at 12,32,” he told the Defence Committee.
Balan pointed out the STS operators, following the Police requests, initiated nine calls to the victim’s mobile to get clearer location information. “Unfortunately, the phone was switched off,” Brigadier General Sorin Balan added.
According to him, the caller identification data can be obtained in case the caller uses a phone on a subscription plan and not a prepaid card. “In this case, the call was made from a prepaid card,” Balan explained.
He also said that the radius of the sector supplied by STS was of 4,438 metres, the area measuring approximately 9 square km. “We couldn’t provide a better location. These are the technical conditions,” Balan pointed out.
The meeting of the Defence Committee assessing the Caracal case continues on Tuesday with classified information.
“Alexandra’s three calls to 112 – correctly processed legislatively and operationally”
The three calls made by Alexandra to the 112 emergency phone number on 25 July were processed correctly from a legislative and operational point of view, First Deputy Director of the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) Brigadier General eng. Sorin Balan stated on Monday at the hearings in the Defence Committee of the Deputies’ Chamber.
“Firstly, we will present the recordings of the three emergency calls to 112 of the minor and other recordings to 112 related to this case. We will present the operational flux for the three calls, we will present the analysis of the manner in which it was operated according to the legislation in force at the STS level, according to the OUG 34/2008. We will refer to the technical functionality of the 112 system on 25 and 26 July. Taking into account that all these pieces of information are classified and we are to present a report to the CSAT [Romania’s Supreme Council for National Defence], I would ask you to allow me not to respond to the questions and present the conclusions of the last two points,” Balan stated.
He stated that “from a technical point of view, from the interrogation of the system registers, it clearly results the fact that the 112 information system didn’t register any malfunctions, the information equipment operated normally, as resulted from the technical verifications of the information systems.”
“The system didn’t generate functioning errors while operating the emergency calls made by the caller, from an operational point of view. From the point of view of the analysis of the manner in which the three emergency calls on 25 July were managed, correlated with the provisions of OUG 34/2008, the operation manual (…) we can very clearly conclude that the three calls were processed correctly from a legislative and operational point of view,” Balan stated.
