RYAN BA­CHOO

Con­tent Dis­tri­b­u­tion Ed­i­tor

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds says he is “con­fi­dent” ar­rests have been made in the ma­jor drug bust last Thurs­day.

Hinds was re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from Guardian Me­dia re­gard­ing the largest land drug bust in this coun­try’s his­to­ry.

In a state­ment on Sun­day, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) said it con­duct­ed a suc­cess­ful joint ex­er­cise where over 168 kilo­grammes of co­caine, worth over $234 mil­lion, was seized dur­ing a mul­ti-agency op­er­a­tion last Thurs­day in Ch­aguara­mas.

Speak­ing to the me­dia yes­ter­day af­ter de­liv­er­ing the open­ing ad­dress at the 37th An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing (AGM) and Con­fer­ence of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean Com­mis­sion­ers of Po­lice (AC­CP) at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain, Hinds said, “I’m con­fi­dent that per­sons were ar­rest­ed from the in­for­ma­tion avail­able to me. I’m con­fi­dent that per­sons were ac­tu­al­ly caught and ar­rest­ed in the process.”

The TTPS re­lease said work­ing close­ly with for­eign part­ners, it gath­ered in­tel­li­gence which led to an op­er­a­tion.

Dur­ing the op­er­a­tion, the team ob­served a black Suzu­ki SUV with three oc­cu­pants en­ter­ing the carpark of a ho­tel in Ch­aguara­mas area around 1.20 pm.

The strike team then re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that the ve­hi­cle was al­leged­ly car­ry­ing a large quan­ti­ty of co­caine and the of­fi­cers in­ter­cept­ed the sus­pects and found a large quan­ti­ty of co­caine weigh­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 168kg and a Glock pis­tol.

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher said in the TTPS state­ment that they worked close­ly with re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners in the bust.

It’s a point As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean Com­mis­sion­ers of Po­lice (AC­CP) pres­i­dent, Ed­vin Mar­tin, backed up in an in­ter­view with the me­dia yes­ter­day at the as­so­ci­a­tion’s con­fer­ence.

Mar­tin al­so said a re­gion­al ap­proach to crime can as­sist small­er is­lands.

He said, “There are many ar­eas in which more ad­vanced and de­vel­oped po­lice forces in the re­gion can ac­tu­al­ly make a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact in help­ing the small­er po­lice forces, be­cause they are more ad­vanced in terms of their de­vel­op­ment, the types of units. Al­so, they tend to be more ad­vanced be­cause they face par­tic­u­lar crime pat­terns that are un­com­mon to some of the small­er states.”

Mar­tin said he hopes for an even more in­te­grat­ed ap­proach to fight­ing crime by the end of the week-long con­fer­ence.