Police investigating the kidnapping of Xtra Foods chief executive Vindra Naipaul-Coolman spent five months searching for her before they began considering the possibility that she might have been murdered.When police and soldiers first raided the homes of some of the 12 accused men at Upper La Puerta Avenue, Diego Martin, on January 6, 2007, they were looking for evidence related to her kidnapping three weeks earlier.
Homicide detective Sgt Sheldine Bacchus testified yesterday that when she led a second raid in Diego Martin in May that year, she and her colleagues were searching for bloodstained clothing and jewelry capable of proving the accused had murdered Naipaul-Coolman.According to the search warrant used by Bacchus, while searching the two-storey home shared by some of the accused, police found 11 cellphones, several pieces of jewelry, a shovel and garden fork.
Bacchus is expected to continue her evidence and will be cross-examined when the case resumes on Monday.At the start of the trial in late March, lead prosecutor Israel Khan, SC, said the State's case was that Naipaul-Coolman was held captive at the home of one of the accused before being killed on a pool table, three days after Christmas 2006.Khan also claimed her body was then chopped into pieces, put in garbage bags and buried in the bush nearby.
EARLIER EVIDENCE
Previous witnesses have testified that they saw a pool table in a room of the unfinished red-brick house owned by one of the accused during the first raid, but when they returned five months later it was missing.In his testimony yesterday, another witness, police photographer PC Davis Seeteram, said two days after the second search, he was summoned to the car park at Old Police Headquarters in Port-of-Spain and was asked to photograph a pool table in the tray of a truck.
Under cross-examination, Seeteram said the table was not stained and did not appear to have cut marks on its felt surface. Asked if he knew where the table came from or where it was carried after he took the photographs, Seetaram said he did not know.Also testifying before Justice Malcolm Holdip and the 12-member jury with five alternates yesterday was fingerprint expert Sgt Rosemarie Horsford, who collected 67 items of evidential value at the red-brick house.
Horsford said she tested the items for fingerprints but found none.She also admitted that shortly after the second raid another was done at a third house where accused Lyndon James lived, but nothing of evidential value linking him to the murder was found.