The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies cam­pus is now on lock­down af­ter a staff mem­ber was kid­napped Wednes­day af­ter­noon.

Po­lice said Maria Dass, who is the Com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion Man­ag­er at UWI's In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Ad­vance­ment, was snatched near the com­pound's North gate as she was on her way to pick up her child from school. Her hus­band is a Shell em­ploy­ee.

De­tails are still sketchy but po­lice said at about 3.20 pm, Dass was dri­ving her car out the cam­pus when a Nis­san Ti­i­da ap­proached and its three oc­cu­pants opened fire on her ve­hi­cle. When Dass stopped her ve­hi­cle her at­tack­ers came out, bun­dled her in­to their car and drove out the com­pound. The get­away ve­hi­cle bore the li­cense num­ber PDK 9561, which was be­lieved to be fake.

The in­ci­dent was wit­nessed by sev­er­al stu­dents, em­ploy­ees and oth­er peo­ple on the cam­pus. Eye­wit­ness­es said one of the kid­nap­pers was dressed like a po­lice of­fi­cer, an­oth­er was in army uni­form and the third was in dark cloth­ing.

An eye­wit­ness who was ap­par­ent­ly a few cars be­hind post­ed on Face­book, "Trinidad is not a re­al place. I'm very shak­en."

The T&T Guardian will up­date this sto­ry as more in­for­ma­tion comes to hand.