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AG WANTS ANSWERS

by Emmanuel Joseph
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By Emmanuel Joseph A Trinidad judge’s accusation that Barbadian police abducted a Port of Spain firearms dealer to have him returned to the twin-island republic to face charges has triggered Attorney General Dale Marshall to order a report into the matter from this island’s top cop. And a senior attorney has also declared that the Barbados Police Service needs to clarify its role in the “international abduction” that Justice Devindra Rampersad said was executed in cahoots with the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) last October. Marshall’s instruction to Commissioner of Police Richard Boyce comes on the heels of the judge levelling the charge against members of the Barbados Police Force last week, in a judgment in which he stayed criminal charges against 61-year-old Trinidadian businessman Brent Thomas. “I am aware of the decision of the Trinidad and Tobago High Court Justice and I have requested a report on the matter from the Commissioner of Police. Until then, I can make no useful comment,” Marshall told Barbados TODAY. The Police Complaints Authority (PCA) in Trinidad has also opened an investigation into the judge’s findings. In his 97-page ruling delivered last Tuesday, the judge declared that Barbados failed to follow the rule of law and due process when it did not comply with the Extradition (Commonwealth and Foreign Territories) Act Chapter 12:04. “That was not the process followed at all. Instead, it was undoubtedly an inescapable inference that the Barbados Police Service detained [Thomas] upon the request of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service,” he said, as he described Thomas’ removal from his hotel in Barbados, where he was staying while in transit to Miami to see his cardiologist, and his almost 14-hour detention by police here before he was forced to return home on a Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force plane. According to Justice Rampersad, the undisputed facts were that Thomas, the owner of Specialists Shooters Training Centre which is an authorised importer and dealer of firearms and ammunition, was asleep in his hotel room on October 5, 2022, when he was awakened by banging on the door and shouts of “police”. He was subsequently taken by a large group of armed men dressed in black, placed in handcuffs, taken to a police station and put in a cage in the back of a police van. Barbados police allegedly kept Thomas in the back of the van until midday without water, food or the opportunity for a phone call, before relocating him to the cell in another police station where he remained until 5 p.m. that day. No explanation was given for his detention up to that point, Justice Rampersad said. “He was then taken to Grantley Adams International Airport where the first claimant and his belongings were taken into a small plane and taken back to Trinidad by ASP Birch and Acting CPL Joefield [TTPS police officers]. All of this evidence was unchallenged by opposing evidence,” the judge continued. “All ASP Birch said in this regard was that he boarded a plane at Piarco International Airport on the evening of October 5, 2022, along with Ms Martin and Corporal Joefield, to Barbados. On arrival, they went to the Immigration Department at the airport where they were escorted back to an area near the tarmac where they met members of the Barbados Police Force. “He said [Thomas] was handed over to Corporal Joefield…together with [his] two pieces of luggage. He told [Thomas] that he was in possession of seven warrants for his arrest and would be taking him back to Trinidad,” the judge recalled. Thomas was charged with illegal possession of weapons, including grenades and rifles, on his return to Trinidad. But the judge found that the matter involved serious breaches of Thomas’ constitutional rights to the extent that all criminal charges against him were stayed. He said the case involved much more than the decision to issue the search warrants. “This involves a course of action running over several months, some within days of each other, which touch upon the judicial review jurisdiction, no doubt, but which is underlain with the thread of alleged constitutional impropriety on behalf of the police in their tone and conduct of the matter,” he asserted. “This was an act that breached such deeply ingrained fundamental freedoms under the Constitution – the right to the protection of the law, the right to due process, and the right to freely move about.” Justice Rampersad added that Thomas’ abduction in Barbados and his “unceremonious and humiliating return to Trinidad, as touted and broadly broadcasted in a self-aggrandising, chest-thumping press release by the TTPS on his return” was sufficient to justify the court’s intervention in the criminal process to stay those proceedings. Leading Barbadian criminal lawyer Andrew Pilgrim KC said if, as the judge stated, the police here had a hand in Thomas’ abduction, somebody needed to be held to account. “On the face of it, I think the police ought to give us an account of their involvement in the matter to say that they were not involved or that they were involved. If they were involved, who commanded them to do so? Let them account for it because a Trinidad court is saying that Barbadian police facilitated this kidnapping,” he told Barbados TODAY on Tuesday. “I am concerned about it because I think it represents a serious, serious infringement on the rights of a CARICOM [Caribbean Community] citizen in our country. If it happened as outlined in the judgment of the case, it means that Barbados would have had to play a role in it, because I don’t believe a Trinidad Defence Force plane could come and land at Grantley Adams, and police in Barbados go and pick up a person, deliver him to the Trinidad police, put him on a plane and send him to Trinidad and lock him up without people here knowing what’s going on. Somebody here has got to account for it.” The senior counsel also suggested that legal action could be brought against the Barbados police. “They would have no authority to arrest him unless he committed a crime here in Barbados, in which case he should have been charged in the courts of Barbados,” he said. Thomas was first arrested in Trinidad on September 29, 2022, and later released before the Barbados incident. One of the attorneys who represented him, Jose Young, told Barbados TODAY via telephone from Trinidad that police had led a witch-hunt against his client. Referring to his detention in police custody in Trinidad, Young recalled: “He was in an absolutely horrendous condition. He was in a room with no ventilation, there were faeces on the ground, they were not feeding him, they were not giving him water to drink. Eventually, when 48 hours came up, we applied for habeas corpus. We got through. The judge was appalled with the conditions he was in considering there were no charges against him up to that time. They were just holding him,” he said. emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb]]>

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