The T&T Po­lice Ser­vice has con­firmed that it is in­ves­ti­gat­ing a video in which pur­ports to show a UNC can­di­date in Mon­day’s Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tion danc­ing with a gun at an event.

A se­nior po­lice of­fi­cial yes­ter­day said the Cy­ber Crime Unit was look­ing in­to video in an ef­fort to iden­ti­fy the in­di­vid­ual, af­ter it was leaked on so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day with a cap­tion sug­gest­ing the in­di­vid­u­als was linked to the UNC’s LG cam­paign.

How­ev­er, con­tact­ed for com­ment on the is­sue yes­ter­day, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the per­son iden­ti­fied by a so­cial me­dia news out­let as a UNC can­di­date in the video is not one of their can­di­dates.

The 28-sec­ond video opens with im­ages of the par­ty’s can­di­date along­side par­ty mem­bers, in­clud­ing Per­sad-Bisses­sar and Sen­a­tor Wade Mark, be­fore tran­si­tion­ing to the al­leged can­di­date with a male in­di­vid­ual danc­ing with what ap­pears to be a firearm at what ap­pears to be a house par­ty. The qual­i­ty of the video is no­tably poor and it is un­cer­tain when and where it was tak­en.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she had pre­vi­ous­ly warned of at­tempts at po­lit­i­cal mis­chief and char­ac­ter as­sas­si­na­tion in a lead-up to Mon­day’s elec­tions.

She main­tained that the per­son seen in the video does not ap­pear to be aligned with the par­ty.

“To the best of my knowl­edge, that is not my can­di­date, that is not my can­di­date, to the best of my knowl­edge that is not my can­di­date, maybe I am wrong, I saw it and they sent it to me but to the best of my knowl­edge, that is not my can­di­date, it’s not a UNC or NTA can­di­date,” Per­sad-Bisses­sar said.

The UNC’s LGE cam­paign has cen­tred around im­prov­ing na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, with the stand-your-ground leg­is­la­tion core to the par­ty’s mes­sage. The leg­is­la­tion, which was first im­ple­ment­ed in Flori­da, pro­vides that peo­ple may use dead­ly force when they rea­son­ably be­lieve it to be nec­es­sary to de­fend against cer­tain vi­o­lent crimes. Guardian Me­dia made sev­er­al ef­forts to con­tact the can­di­date al­leged to be in the video for a re­sponse to the claims, but all calls went unan­swered.