Trinidad: Prison officer’s home firebombed

(TRINIDAD GUARDIAN) Po­lice are in­ves­ti­gat­ing an in­ci­dent in which a prison of­fi­cer’s Tacarigua home was fire­bombed ear­ly yes­ter­day.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, the at­tack oc­curred around 1.20 am while Khalil Baksh, 53, who is as­signed to the East­ern Cor­rec­tion and Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­tre in San­ta Rosa, and his son, who is a po­lice of­fi­cer, were at home.

The fa­ther and son were awak­ened by a loud crash­ing noise and when they came out­side they found a bro­ken win­dow pane and a small fire around it. They ex­tin­guished the fire and con­tact­ed po­lice.

Video footage of the in­ci­dent cap­tured on CCTV cam­eras on Baksh’s home, showed two men walk­ing in the road and stop­ping in front of Baksh’s home. The men then took out chan­na bombs (Molo­tov cock­tails with dried chick­peas) from a bag they were car­ry­ing, lit three and hurled them to­wards the house be­fore walk­ing away. The men did not ap­pear to be wear­ing masks when car­ry­ing out the act.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Prison Of­fi­cers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (POA) sec­re­tary Ger­ard Gor­don con­firmed the in­ci­dent. He said his or­gan­i­sa­tion and se­nior prison of­fi­cers had spo­ken to Baksh yes­ter­day morn­ing. Gor­don de­clined to re­veal what se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures, if any, have been in­sti­tut­ed for Baksh and his fam­i­ly since.

No ar­rests had been made up to late yes­ter­day. Po­lice are in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether the in­ci­dent was linked to his job or an in­ci­dent which oc­curred while he was on du­ty.

Yes­ter­day’s in­ci­dent came three days af­ter act­ing Prison Su­per­in­ten­dent Wayne Jack­son was mur­dered. Jack­son, who was as­signed to the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison in Arou­ca, had just ar­rived at his Mal­abar home when he was am­bushed and shot dead by gun­men.

Fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith and a team of of­fi­cers from the In­ter-Agency Task Force (IATF) toured the prison to de­ter­mine ar­eas where mem­bers of the unit could be de­ployed. The unit was im­plant­ed in the MSP on Thurs­day.