An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa@guardian.co.tt

Se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port were strength­ened overnight on Fri­day, fol­low­ing a dar­ing rob­bery at the Pi­ta Pit in which cash and valu­ables were stolen at gun­point.

The Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (AATT) yes­ter­day con­firmed it had “im­ple­ment­ed fur­ther mea­sures to re­in­force its se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port” af­ter the rob­bery that took place around 9.40 pm.

Re­ports in­di­cate two fe­male em­ploy­ees were at work when a man pre­tend­ing to be a cus­tomer walked up and asked for the price of a Sprite.

Grab­bing the first woman by the neck whilst the sec­ond sus­pect grabbed the oth­er woman by the arm, the two men dragged the women in­to the of­fice and pushed them to the floor.

One of the women was struck with the firearm in her waist as the sus­pects de­mand­ed mon­ey and valu­ables.

The ban­dits took the cash pan con­tain­ing the $2,580 float, along with a Sam­sung S10 cell phone val­ued at $2,500 and an Ap­ple iPhone 11 val­ued at $2,000.

The sus­pects lat­er walked out of the air­port and got in­to a wait­ing car which sped off but not be­fore one of them dropped a cell­phone.

The AATT moved to as­sure em­ploy­ees, trav­ellers and vis­i­tors to the air­port that they had “re­de­ployed its ex­ist­ing se­cu­ri­ty man­pow­er and re­sources” to mit­i­gate against fur­ther threats of this na­ture.

They stat­ed that they have reached out to the Home­land and De­fence min­istries.

The au­thor­i­ty has al­so en­gaged the Es­tate Po­lice As­so­ci­a­tion (EPA) which rep­re­sents its se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers. “The EPA has in­di­cat­ed its con­tin­ued sup­port for plans to strength­en our se­cu­ri­ty ap­pa­ra­tus,” the re­lease stat­ed.

“We are al­so cur­rent­ly im­ple­ment­ing plans to in­crease the se­cu­ri­ty man­pow­er at the Pi­ar­co and ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­ports, as ev­i­denced by re­cent ad­ver­tise­ments is­sued for es­tate con­sta­bles.”

They stat­ed that Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion Min­is­ter Eli Za­k­our has been ac­tive­ly in­volved in de­vel­op­ing strate­gies for the en­hance­ment of the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of the air­port.