Derek Achong

For the sec­ond time in a lit­tle over two weeks, North East­ern Di­vi­sion Po­lice re­cov­ered sev­en il­le­gal guns yes­ter­day dur­ing a six hour an­ti-crime ex­er­cise.Three of the guns were re­cov­ered in Mon Re­pos, Mor­vant, close to the scene where 27-year-old res­i­dent Phillip Hillaire was shot dead hours be­fore on Tues­day night.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, around mid­day on Wednes­day, of­fi­cers of the North East­ern Di­vi­sion Task Force (NEDTF), led by Sgt Cor­nelius Samuel and Cpl Sunil Bharath, re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that the il­le­gal weapons were hid­den near the scene of Hillaire's mur­der.

The area was searched and the guns–a re­volver and two pis­tols–were found hid­den in a bam­boo patch. In­ves­ti­ga­tors said the weapons were poor­ly hid­den and were sent to the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre, St James, for bal­lis­tic test­ing to de­ter­mine if they were the ones used in Hillaire's mur­der, as his killers might have dis­posed of it af­ter shoot­ing him sev­er­al times around 10.30 pm on Tues­day.

The team of of­fi­cers then went to Pel­i­can Ex­ten­sion, Mor­vant, where they re­cov­ered a pump-ac­tion shot­gun and two pis­tols, which were hid­den a bushy area off the road.They then went to the home of a el­der­ly cou­ple at Jag­gan Vil­lage, San­ta Cruz, where they found a home­made gun hid­den un­der the house.The cou­ple was not ar­rest­ed as in­ves­ti­ga­tors be­lieve the gun be­longs to a gang in the com­mu­ni­ty and was pos­si­bly hid­den there with­out the knowl­edge of the cou­ple.

On Jan­u­ary 13, the same group of of­fi­cers con­duct­ed a sim­i­lar ex­er­cise in Mor­vant and Barataria and seized sev­en guns, a large cache of am­mu­ni­tion and ar­rest­ed two men.While no one was ar­rest­ed dur­ing yes­ter­day's ex­er­cise, po­lice said that they ex­pect to make sev­er­al ar­rests in con­nec­tion with drug and gang ac­tiv­i­ty in the di­vi­sion."We know who you are. We will hunt you down," In­sp Roger Alexan­der, head of the NEDTF, said in a tele­phone in­ter­view af­ter yes­ter­day's ex­er­cise.

PCs Clint Dass, Bran­don Thomp­son, Mar­vin Forde, Steven John­son, Jerome Gor­don and An­dell Ce­les­tine were al­so in­volved in the ex­er­cise.