RHON­DOR DOWLAT-ROS­TANT

The third sus­pect in Wednes­day night's shoot­ing in­ci­dent on La­dy Chan­cel­lor road has been found, po­lice con­firm.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands mem­bers of the Port-of-Spain Task Force (POSTF) found the sus­pect ly­ing mo­tion­less in some bush­es off La­dy Chan­cel­lor Road. Of­fi­cers con­duct­ed a search and found a firearm in his pos­ses­sion.

Mean­while, the sec­ond sus­pect re­mains ward­ed at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal (POS­GH) un­der po­lice guard.

Ac­cord­ing to a po­lice re­port, at about 7:15 pm on Wednes­day, a 33-year-old po­lice con­sta­ble, the hold­er of a li­censed firearm, was walk­ing along La­dy Chan­cel­lor Road with his girl­friend, when he ob­served a gold-coloured Nis­san Almera (bear­ing num­ber plates with mark­ings PBZ 2192) parked on the south­ern side of the road with three male oc­cu­pants, all of African de­scent.

The of­fi­cer then ob­served one of the oc­cu­pants ex­it the ve­hi­cle and point a firearm at him.  The gun­man re­port­ed­ly opened fire on the po­lice of­fi­cer.

Po­lice said the of­fi­cer be­came fear­ful for his life and drew his li­censed firearm and fired sev­er­al shots in the di­rec­tion of the ve­hi­cle.  The dri­ver of the ve­hi­cle was wound­ed by the po­lice of­fi­cer’s shots.

The oth­er two oc­cu­pants re­port­ed­ly ran in­to some near­by bush­es where they es­caped.

The POSTF, un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Sgt Alexan­der, re­spond­ed to the re­port and con­veyed the in­jured man to the POS­GH, where he suc­cumbed to his in­juries.

He was lat­er iden­ti­fied as Franklyn De­fre­itas of LP # 73 Rich Plain Diego Mar­tin. De­fre­itas cel­e­brat­ed his 25th birth­day on Wednes­day.

The scene was vis­it­ed by ASP Bhag­wan­deen and Du­ty In­spec­tor (Ag) Hospedales Year­wood and processed.

The ve­hi­cle al­so was tak­en in for pro­cess­ing.

In­ves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing.