Albania’s Centralized Purchasing Operator has opened a tender worth approximately €2.4 million for a new police biometric identification center. The planned facility will combine fixed enrollment stations and portable devices for collecting and comparing fingerprints, palm prints, facial images, voice samples, tattoos and other identifying marks.
The procurement has a ceiling of 223.6 million Albanian lek excluding value-added tax, equivalent to about €2.39 million. The center is planned for the Material-Technical Supply Center in Mullet and is described as a Multi-application Biometric Personal Identification Systems center, abbreviated AMAIS.
The equipment package includes 12 multifunction biometric systems and 30 portable units. The fixed systems are intended to support enrollment and identification across several biometric modalities, while the mobile devices would allow police to perform checks away from the central facility.
Specifications described in local procurement reporting call for the portable units to read radio frequency identification chips and machine-readable zones in identity documents. They would compare the document portrait and fingerprints with the person presenting the credential and retrieve records from connected police databases.
The AMAIS center is expected to integrate with Albania’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, its person identification platform, and AFAIS, a forensic application used for additional biometric processing. Linking those systems would give officers a common workflow for collecting evidence, searching records and checking identities.
The project adds a law-enforcement component to Albania’s broader identity modernization. The government has targeted a 2026 launch for a national digital identity as part of its alignment with European Union systems. Albania has also expanded identity-document options for diaspora voters and used biometric voter verification in domestic elections.
Those civil identity projects serve different purposes from the police center, which is designed for identification and investigation. The common feature is increased reliance on interoperable identity infrastructure, making system access controls, audit trails and data governance important alongside matching performance.
The open competition will select a supplier to deliver the center and device fleet, including installation and integration with the existing police platforms. Delivery will require hardware deployment, operator workflows and connections to the national police databases already in use.
Sources: CNA Albania, Albanian Construction Portal
–
By the ID Tech Editorial Team
