Trinidad: Accused in multi-million dollar drug bust seek bail adjustment

(Trinidad Guardian) The par­ents of Krys­tiana Sankar will try again to­day to get her out of jail af­ter her at­tor­ney, Lar­ry Williams, suc­cess­ful­ly filed an ap­pli­ca­tion to have the terms of her bail ad­just­ed.

Sankar, 24 and Yan­nis Peb­bles Au­gus­tine were each grant­ed bail to the sum $6 mil­lion on Mon­day af­ter they ap­peared in court joint­ly charged with pos­ses­sion of mar­i­jua­na and co­caine for the pur­pose of traf­fick­ing along­side Aru­ba Eligon and Jer­von Cole.

The four were ar­rest­ed fol­low­ing a $3.8 mil­lion drug bust at Apart­ment 1, Re­gent Gar­dens, West­moor­ings, last week Tues­day. Sankar al­so faces charges of the un­law­ful pos­ses­sion of a gun and am­mu­ni­tion.

How­ev­er, when Mag­is­trate Aden Stroude grant­ed the $6 mil­lion sum it re­quired that the bail would be cov­ered by one prop­er­ty. How­ev­er, that stip­u­la­tion left the women with very lit­tle op­tion in terms of se­cur­ing their free­dom as they could get no one with a prop­er­ty of that val­ue or high­er to stand bail on their be­half.

Williams sub­mit­ted a re­quest on Wednes­day to have the re­quire­ment ad­just­ed to two prop­er­ties. The re­quest al­low­ing for two prop­er­ties to be used to se­cure bail was agreed to yes­ter­day.

The T&T Guardian un­der­stands that Sankar’s par­ents, up­on learn­ing this, went to a Jus­tice of the Peace short­ly be­fore 4 pm to be­gin the process of se­cur­ing bail for their daugh­ter.

But Williams told the T&T Guardian that de­spite this change Sankar is still un­like­ly to be re­leased be­fore next week. This is be­cause the val­ue of the prop­er­ties placed would still re­quire an as­sess­ment to en­sure they cov­er the $6 mil­lion fig­ure.

Au­gus­tine’s at­tor­ney, Samuel Pe­te Thomas, mean­while said he too plans to sub­mit an ap­pli­ca­tion for an ad­just­ment of the bail stip­u­la­tion on Mon­day when the four ac­cused re­turn to court.

Eligon was de­nied bail out­right dur­ing Mon­day’s hear­ing, as it was found he had two pre­vi­ous drug of­fences on his record. Cole was not grant­ed bail af­ter the court was un­able to ver­i­fy his res­i­den­tial ad­dress. His bail ap­pli­ca­tion will be re­con­sid­ered pend­ing the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of an ad­dress he gave to the court on Mon­day.

Po­lice con­firmed ear­li­er this week that the fifth per­son ar­rest­ed in con­nec­tion with the drug bust, the dri­ver of black BMW, was re­leased af­ter it was found there was in­suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to charge him in con­nec­tion with the find.

In a re­lease on Wednes­day, the TTPS al­so re­fut­ed claims that the man was re­lat­ed to any “high rank­ing of­fi­cial.”