Kidnap mayhem abounds...

As if by design, the disbelief or refusal of society to believe was washed away by this week’s headlines. The shocking horror stories and dehumanising experience of kidnap victims made even the most unpatriotic Trini cringe in disgust at the sad state of our beloved nation. Many refused to accept the harsh reality of what these unfortunate victims and their families have been forced to undergo; society flippantly shrugged off this entire kidnapping phenomenon.

The image of babies crawling around in the blood of their murdered grandparents reminded us of the extent of the criminal evil that has infiltrated our beloved soca paradise. Many sought refuge in the fact that the nation’s Police Service remained a tangible and visible reminder of the existence of law and order in our society.

But whatever comfort one derived from the latter was dashed to pieces by the mafia-style execution of a brave kidnap victim who dared to testify against his abductors. His murder compelled us to remember the impotence of our lethargic, ineffective criminal justice system and the inability of the State to protect even the most vulnerable and exposed targets.

This latest execution of yet another State witness has made a mockery of the Government’s idle boast of having a grip on the crime situation. The irrational choices of who would be kidnap victims, it had made no sense to me, suddenly started making sense. I received calls from no fewer than five of the victims who had told me their stories. They called to remind me of how wrong I was to encourage them to stand up and co-operate with the police in securing the arrest and conviction of their kidnappers.

Mr X, who was taken to the forest in Blanchiseusse and pistol-whipped until he literally peed his pants, is forced to live with a different kind of pain. His severe personal injuries are the least of his concerns. His bank and credit cards were taken and he was forced to disclose his pin number after a kick that broke two of his ribs.

As one man made his way to the nearest ATM machine to calmly withdraw the maximum permissible daily limit from X’s accounts, another one telephoned Mr X’s daughters on their cellphones and remained silent when they said answered. Mr X was interrogated, while being tortured, about whether he had any security alarm systems in his house, any rapid response service with any private security firm, what kind of people his neighbours were, what kind of jewelry these families owned and where they kept them, whether he, Mr X, had a safe at home and the amount of money his family had in their bank accounts.

The kidnappers used Mr X’s cellphone to lure his two worried daughters back to their home where they were brutally raped by two men.

A walking bullseye

Two suspects have been arrested and charged but now Mr X is terrified and no longer wishes to testify against them because he feels as if he is a walking bullseye. Mr X intends to publicly indicate his refusal to testify at the next hearing of the case because he is convinced that police officers were involved in his abduction and that no one in authority has ever paid heed to his pleas.

Mr X’s confidence in the Police Service deteriorated even more rapidly when he was reduced to begging officers from the Arima Police Station to investigate clear leads. Up to now, the police are yet to secure the relevant video footage from the bank’s security cameras to ascertain the identity of the person who made the withdrawal from his account on the night Mr X was kidnapped.

No one has bothered to investigate the numbers the kidnappers had dialled from Mr X’s cellphone on that fateful night. And no one from the Police Service has ever had the courtesy to inform him, the main witness, about the dates for the court case against two of his abductors; he had to learn from a friend that the matter had twice been adjourned in his absence.

Why was Mr X never informed about the date of his court matter? He is, after all, the main State witness. Is this another example of bungling incompetence on the part of the police? Or is it a deliberate conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and ensure that the accused walk free?

How can Mr X forget the fearless boast of the man who broke his ribs that he was a police officer “with connections all around?”

Ms S, another kidnap victim called to remind me about our conversation concerning her failure to positively identify a man she clearly remembered as one of her kidnappers and rapists at an official police ID parade. Her family had received several threatening phone calls the day before the ID parade and the police had offered no protection.

Would it have been right for her to risk the lives of her loved ones who had just sacrificed their entire life’s savings to secure her release? Innocent casualties in the noble pursuit of justice was a price she could not bear. She therefore let one of her attackers walk and actually received an anonymous “thank you” call with the caller telling her she was “a good girl” and had “done the right thing” by choosing to protect her family.

Mr B, a quarry operator, struggled with his kidnappers, but was beaten into submission by men who told him they were policemen and soldiers.

He was taken to the forest in Tabaquite, bound and gagged and left there because his struggle had foiled the timing of the kidnappers’ plan.

They had planned to capture and transport him in the darkness of the early morning, but they found themselves facing the breaking dawn as Mr B struggled with them. B was able to free himself and stagger around for miles until he found help. He thought he was being clever by marking the spot where he was left by the kidnappers who planned to return for him that night, but the police never even bothered to keep the area under surveillance.

Like most of the kidnap victims I talked to, foreign-used car dealer Mr Y, has applied to the Commissioner of Police for a firearm user’s license. The Commissioner of Police has sat on these applications for several months now without no decision forthcoming. In the cases where the COP has given a decision, he has decided against giving a license.

How serious are we about cracking the backbone of this pernicious kidnapping ring when victims-cum-witnesses are left without any form of police protection, are not placed in a witness protection programme or police safe house, and are then incredibly denied a gun license to protect and defend themselves?

The kidnapped victims who have told me their stories have no confidence in the Police Service. Once the victims were freed, the standard and quality of the continuing investigation left a lot to be desired and, invariably, it has been the families of these victims and not the police, who remain the driving force behind subsequent investigations.

Once a victim is released, the police, in effect, operate as if the case is closed.

Police involvement

Police involvement in kidnappings is no longer considered a product of an overactive imagination prone to conspiracy theories. There are several police and army officers before the courts on charges of kidnapping. Rumours abound about a particular senior police officer who is said to be the mastermind of the kidnapping ring in Trinidad and Tobago.

One kidnap victim who has migrated said he had received a visit from one of the Prime Minister’s special advisors on National Security because he (the victim) had evidence that certain senior police officers were involved in his kidnapping.

To this official, he said he indicated his willingness to return to T&T to testify if he could be given the guarantee that his family would be relocated, given new identities and placed in a secure witness protection programme abroad. He was told that his evidence was critical and arrangements would be made for him and his family to return; nothing has even happened since then and to date, a low-level, Special Reserve police officer is the only one to have been charged in this kidnapping.

Mr D says he’s living proof of the impotence of the Police Service in dealing with kidnapping. He was kidnapped twice. The second time around, he was kidnapped to “teach him a lesson” because he was co-operating with the police in their investigations.

One honest, eager beaver police officer had attempted to conduct a serious police investigation into Mr D’s kidnapping and Mr D paid the ultimate price. No ransom demand was made the second time around he was kidnapped; Mr D was simply taken to a shack where he was tortured, sodomised and then released with a warning.

Another kidnap victim. Ms C, was raped, but did not have the courage to say so. She said Jade was her heroine, because Sollis remains the only case where the kidnap victim had the courage to publically admit that she was not just kidnapped, but tortured and raped.

Most victims continue to suffer in silence. Ms C said the way she was treated and handled by the police after her release added to her trauma after the harrowing ordeal of abduction and captivity.

“I felt like I was an object in a museum with numerous officers trying to catch a glimpse. I wanted to grieve, recover and be immediately reunited with my family. However, I had to first be subjected to the mauvaise langue microscope,” she said.

If the Army and Police Service are part of the kidnapping problem, it is difficult to see how they can be part the solution unless the criminal elements are first removed.

The evidence of involvement on the part of police and army officers in kidnapping cases is overwhelming. Young Uttamdeo Maharaj was murdered in Palo Seco when he foiled an attempt to kidnap his sister. The gun that was used in his killing turned out to be an official police gun that had been logged at the Arima Police Station. To date, no one has explained how a police gun found itself into the hands of kidnappers at the opposite end of the island in Palo Seco, so that they could murder Maharaj.

In the midst of all the current mayhem, grief and bloodshed, Prime Minister Patrick Manning says he needs one more year to bring crime under control and the Commissioner of Police says he is mobilising all his resources and troops to take crime-fighting to a higher level because Carnival 2007 is under threat.

“No one will interfere with our mas!”

Alas, if only Carnival was all year round.