To my hor­ror, on read­ing the T&T Guardian this morn­ing, there was a two-page spread of gang mem­bers at­tack­ing two for­eign­ers on Car­ni­val Tues­day.It was ex­treme­ly up­set­ting and I must say as the days go by I am los­ing the sense of pride that I once had for be­ing a Tri­ni. What is go­ing on in our na­tion? We have clear­ly lost all re­spect for our­selves, our neigh­bours and now our guests. It is ab­solute­ly hor­ren­dous!

The sight of these men makes your stom­ach churn as, from the pic­tures, they out­num­bered the cou­ple and thrashed the man se­vere­ly be­fore re-join­ing the fes­tiv­i­ties. What is even more shock­ing is the fact that there were on­look­ers (which in­clud­ed chil­dren!) ca­su­al­ly stand­ing by with fold­ed arms tak­ing in the hor­ror as though it was some amus­ing film and not even at­tempt­ing to do some­thing. The band se­cu­ri­ty who at­tempt­ed to in­ter­vene was al­so beat­en mer­ci­less­ly by these brutes.

It is un­be­liev­able that all this oc­curred on the Grand Stand and so many were obliv­i­ous (in­clud­ing po­lice) de­spite calls be­ing made from the band's trucks. Is this what Car­ni­val has come to? I am ab­solute­ly out­raged!I would like to query where were all the CCTV cam­eras we boast­ed of. How is it that a wit­ness and the news­pa­per pho­tog­ra­ph­er had to cap­ture these ghast­ly oc­cur­rences? How suc­cess­ful are these cam­eras re­al­ly?

I would al­so like to en­quire whether the DPP, Roger Gas­pard, would move to charge these clear­ly iden­ti­fied men un­der the An­ti-Gang leg­is­la­tion. It is about time we ex­er­cise the law and show these crim­i­nals that they are not above it.I pity these for­eign­ers' ex­pe­ri­ence and I apol­o­gise on be­half of my coun­try but I would nev­er rec­om­mend that they re­turn to these un­car­ing, un­couth beasts! Some­thing should be done quick­ly else we would see this coun­try plum­met­ing to its worst. I rec­om­mend the DPP act swift­ly. We want to see jus­tice, not just files be­ing sent to col­lect dust while these men roam freely! Not every­body has a 24-hour se­cu­ri­ty de­tail pro­tect­ing them and their fam­i­ly Mr DPP.

Joanne Hall

La Hor­quette