The International Criminal Police Organization, INTERPOL, has identified 6,362 suspects of terrorism in a bid to reinforce global efforts in detecting, tracking and disrupting terrorists movements worldwide.
The body disclosed that it embarked on an investigation, bringing together 28 specialized officers and security experts from 11 countries, through the use of Artificial Intelligence, AI, which initially resulted in an extraction of 108,076 facial images from visual content published by Jihadist groups.
The exercise, identified as Operation Shams, held from June 1 till 5th, 2026, in Tunisia, programmed AI agents and scripts generated through the internet tool were to automate parts of the data collection and investigative processes, enabling the system to deduplicate and quality-check the images, which arrowed the number of the suspects.
The verification, in accordance with INTERPOL Rules and Processing of Data, led to its officers from the National Central Bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, provided a large intelligence dataset related terrorism suspects, adding hundred more imaged awaiting extraction and processing.
The exercise also involved cryptocurrency tools to trace illicit funding, leading to three urgent requests to a virtual asset service provider, aimed at disclosing customer data to disrupt terrorists funding.
The participating countries also target the issues of online gaming industry to address youth’s radicalization in online environment.
The measure has also been used to support judicial procedures among the 11 countries, one which involves a detained terrorists suspect