Resh­ma Ra­goonath

Af­ter four days of in­ten­sive search­ing, there is still no sign of Princes Town moth­er of three Bis­soon­daye Gee­ta Seenath.Po­lice and army of­fi­cers in­creased their res­cue teams' num­bers as they combed the North­ern Range, look­ing for Seenath, 47, who went miss­ing on Sat­ur­day dur­ing a hike near Rio Seco Falls.Rel­a­tives of the miss­ing woman al­so joined the search yes­ter­day.Po­lice re­ports say Seenath, of Chapel Street, Princes Town, went with a group of 40 peo­ple on an ex­cur­sion to Saly­bia beach on Sat­ur­day.

When they ar­rived, 13 of the 40 de­cid­ed to hike to Rio Seco falls.Af­ter the brief hike to the falls the group left and re­turned to the beach. Around 4.30 pm they re­alised Seenath was miss­ing and a search was im­me­di­ate­ly launched.The group re­port­ed the mat­ter at Matu­ra Po­lice Sta­tion and a search was launched for the miss­ing woman.Civ­il Mil­i­tary Af­fairs of­fi­cer of the De­fence Force Ma­jor Al Alexan­der con­firmed that the search for Seenath re­sumed at 6.30 am yes­ter­day and more per­son­nel were called out to join in the search.

He said the First En­gi­neer Bat­tal­ion of T&T Reg­i­ment, work­ing along­side po­lice from Matu­ra and Forestry of­fi­cers, combed the area."We are hop­ing to be suc­cess­ful," Alexan­der said.Con­ser­va­tor of Forests John­ny Seep­er­sad has or­dered a re­port in­to the in­ci­dent in­volv­ing Seenath, since the area she dis­ap­peared in is con­sid­ered part of the Matu­ra Na­tion­al Park, which is a pro­tect­ed forestry site.

Seep­er­sad told the T&T Guardian it is open to the pub­lic nev­er­the­less."If you want to go hik­ing you do not need to get per­mis­sion...It is free to the en­tire pop­u­la­tion if you want to go there," he said.Seep­er­sad said pri­vate hik­ing groups go to the area on tours and some­times vil­lagers are paid to take small par­ties of hik­ers on the trail.He ex­plained that the group that Seenath went to Saly­bia with on Sat­ur­day is not a reg­is­tered hik­ing group.

"It looks like a group or­gan­ised an ex­cur­sion to the falls and on their way back she missed the trail and this hap­pened," he said.Seep­er­sad is­sued a word of ad­vice to those who want to go hik­ing: "Please con­tact Forestry for ad­vice and guid­ance on these hikes and we will as­sist as much as we can to avoid such calamites as this."An of­fi­cial from a lo­cal hik­ing en­thu­si­ast group, Hike Seek­ers, in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, said the trail that Seenath went on is one of the pop­u­lar and eas­i­er nat­ur­al trails be­cause it is clear­ly marked.

The of­fi­cial said it takes 35 min­utes to an hour to get to the falls from the beach, de­pend­ing on an in­di­vid­ual's fit­ness lev­el.Sergeant Christo­pher Fuentes of the Matu­ra Po­lice Sta­tion is lead­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion.