SPANKING NEW: Senior Supt of the Central Division Rattan Singh, right, and Police Commissioner Trevor Paul tour the Brasso/ Flanagin Police Post yesterday after it was opened. -Photo: DAVE PERSAD
Police suspect that 33 kilogrammes of cocaine stored in the property room of the Princes Town Police Station, might have been taken by the same "human rats" who stole a similar amount of the drug from the station three years ago.
An inventory has been requested of all evidence in the property room, a place where items lost, seized or stolen are kept pending use in a trial, return to owners, or destruction by the State.
The investigation has been requested by Superintendent Chadrabhan Maharaj, who is based at the station, and who, it was learned, received information that the cocaine had been taken and sold.
The Express was told that hesitation by junior officers to conduct the inventory has led to a complaint being recorded in the police station's log book.
Maharaj could not be contacted yesterday.
His telephone number at the station is out of service.
Commissioner of Police Trevor Paul declined to take questions at yesterday's official opening of the Brasso Police Post in Central Trinidad.
Maharaj is the police officer who two months ago turned down a promotion to the rank of Acting Senior Superintendent Southern Division, because he said there were too many corrupted police officers involved in the guns and drug trade.
Report of narcotics being stolen from the Princes Town Station first surfaced during the 2005 trial of a couple charged with trafficking in more than 73 kilogrammes of cocaine.
During the trial, a police sergeant said the year before he went to check on the cocaine in the property room and found that half was gone.
The couple were freed, and presiding judge Herbert Volney blasted the police, saying that "human rats" had eaten the cocaine. A investigation into the disappearance by Assistant Commissioner of Police Glenroy Woodley, is still to be completed.
The new investigation involves cocaine that was found by a farmer buried in a canefield in Tableland in August 2000, and taken to the Princes Town Station to be kept while the drug dealers were hunted.
No one was ever held.
The cocaine was part of a multi-million dollar shipment apparently lost at sea and which began floating ashore on Trinidad's south and east coasts. There was a race back then between police and thieves trying to get to the cocaine first.
Imagine the police stations not even safe. The police can't even guard evidence in a police station, where the police are for most of the time, so how they expect to protect the citizens who are not even in same building as them? How does the TTPS expect the citizenry to have any faith in them? And to think that this has happened before in the same station, one would have thought that measures would be put in place to prevent a re-occurrence, but then this is the Trinidad & Tobago Police Service we speak of, in other words, a bunch of bungling idiots who can be categorised as having only 3 CXC passes. Lord put ah hand!
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