Chittagong Customs House is now struggling to keep the station under constant surveillance due to inactive close-circuit television cameras and lack of memory space to keep record of footages for future use.

In 2011, the National Board of Revenue directed the customs house to install CCTV cameras to ensure security at the station as well as to stop bribes and pilferage of important files.

Accordingly, the customs house installed 60 such cameras and appointed Ark Power as the operator. But the agreement with Ark expired in 2015 and no new operator was locked in. In the absence of a contract, Ark stopped preserving the footages captured by the cameras.

More than half of the cameras do not work at all due to lack of regular maintenance and the officials concerned do not even know whether the existing cameras are actually working or not, said an official requesting anonymity.

The cameras that are operational have apparently become useless due to non-availability of memory space to store footages, the official said.

In 2016, initiatives were taken to install 190 more cameras at the customs station but the steps never saw the light of day.

The theft of 65 confidential files of the customs house, which were recovered on December 27 last year, could have been prevented if the CCTV footages were available, according to the Customs Intelligence and Investigation Directorate that conducted the raid.

The files, which were recovered from a garment factory at Halishahar in Chittagong, included bank guarantee documents and value assessment against different import consignments and case documents, all of which were supposed to be preserved at the customs house.

A senior customs official requesting to remain unnamed said the exchange of bribes takes place at the house's assessment department in broad daylight although 20 cameras are present.

Steps will soon be taken to make all the cameras functional and to store the CCTV footages, AKM Nuruzzaman, the newly appointed commissioner of the Chittagong Customs House, told The Daily Star.

“The construction of a new building for the customs house is going on, and the whole station will be brought under CCTV surveillance as soon as the work ends.”