Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

A school­boy es­caped from a car trunk while his cousin was shot af­ter Span­ish-speak­ing sus­pects kid­napped them in Pe­nal on Tues­day.

The 16-year-old Form Three stu­dent went with his 33-year-old cousin, an air- con­di­tion­ing tech­ni­cian from La Ro­main, in his (cousin’s) Ti­i­da to Pe­nal to pick up two Span­ish women.

When they ar­rived at a two-storey con­crete struc­ture at Jhu­lai Trace, Pe­nal Rock Road, around 5 pm, a white ve­hi­cle stopped at the rear of their car.

Sev­en Span­ish-speak­ing oc­cu­pants, some armed with guns, ex­it­ed and or­dered them out of the Ti­i­da. One of the gun­men then struck the teenag­er on his head with a firearm and forced him in­to the trunk of his cousin’s car.

The sus­pects or­dered the teenag­er’s cousin to sit in the back seat. As the sus­pects drove off with the Ti­i­da, the teenag­er made sev­er­al at­tempts to open the trunk and about five min­utes lat­er, he man­aged to force it open.

The teenag­er got out, and as he ran through the bush­es, he heard three loud ex­plo­sions.

Mean­while, the po­lice re­spond­ed to a re­port of a shoot­ing at Seemu­n­gal Branch Trace around 6.30 pm and found the teenag­er hid­ing in the bush­es. The of­fi­cers searched the area for the Ti­i­da and his cousin, but they were un­suc­cess­ful.

More than two hours lat­er, the po­lice re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that an EHS am­bu­lance took a man with a gun­shot wound to the Siparia Dis­trict Health Fa­cil­i­ty. The of­fi­cers went to the fa­cil­i­ty and met the teenag­er’s cousin. He re­port­ed that af­ter the teenag­er es­caped, he al­so tried to es­cape and strug­gled with the men. He man­aged to open the door and sprint­ed to free­dom, but the sus­pects shot af­ter him. He was shot un­der his right arm. He hid in the bush­es and lat­er flagged down an am­bu­lance.