The Special Unit of the Police Force of Luxembourg (USP) is in charge of special intervention and surveillance missions. This national unit assists other police units if the gravity of the crime and the risk for other police units respectively for other people justify such an intervention and when the success of the police action would otherwise be to difficult to obtain respectively be impossible

The primary missions are interventions during hostage taking, kidnapping and extortion situations. The unit is also deployed to achieve the arrest of dangerous criminals, to carry out surveillance and close protection missions and to assure the escorts of dangerous criminals.

In case of a bomb alert, the EOD-squad of the USP gets into action in order to detect and neutralize the explosives.

Negotiation and marksmen missions are also carried out by the USP.

The unit is the national center of competence for image and audio treatment.Finally, the USP constitutes the rapid intervention company in case of maintaining and restoring the public order.

Since the merge of the two former special units of the national Police and the grand-ducal Gendarmerie in 2000, the USP has carried out about 1650 missions.

Two third have been missions in the judicial police domain (arrests and surveillance) and one third of the missions took place in the administrative police domain (close protection, escorts, etc.).