Nine held over prison officers' murders in early-morning raid

NINE men were arrested on Tuesday in relation to the shooting deaths of two prison officers in a police exercise in Carapo .

Speaking at a media conference on Tuesday, DCP Mc Donald Jacob said 14 people had been held, among them the murder suspects.

He said, “Presently our investigators from the Homicide Bureau of Investigations, with support of officers in the Northern Division, are doing what is required to assist us to try to solve these heinous crimes.”

Jacob praised the officers, who consisted of over 100 members of the police and Defence Force, with assistance from the Prisons Service's tactical team. He said the exercise began at 4 am and at the time of the media briefing, which began at 11 am, officers were still out on the field.

The arrests came the day after Nigel Michael Jones, 38, of Ruby Roberts Lane, Fyzabad, was shot dead at the Fyzabad taxi stand in Siparia.

Police said Jones and his six-year-old daughter were at the stand at the corner of High Street and Siparia Old Road, Siparia, at around 3 pm when a car pulled up next to them and the occupants fired several shots. The car then drove off.

Three days earlier Trevor Serrette, 48, was shot dead while working at his fruit stall on the Eastern Main Road in Valencia.

Police reported that Serrette, of La Seiva Road, Sangre Grande, was ambushed and killed at about 1.30 pm.

Both men were with a relative when they were killed who remained uninjured. Both worked at the Wayne Jackson Building at the Maximum Security Prison, Arouca. The building, named after a senior prisons officer murdered outside his home in 2018, is used to house the country’s most high-profile prisoners.

Jacob said it was too early to say whether the murder of the two officers, days apart, is linked to an incident at the building earlier this year. In July prisoners there set fire to mattresses and locked themselves in their cells in defiance of prison officers who were trying to move them.

A month later, after the cells were searched, officers were threatened. During the search, officers found cell phones, chargers, cigarettes, electric shavers, marijuana, wrapping papers and lighters.