Email

Print

Deputy Compol Williams explained today:...

Chester Williams- Deputy ComPol
"We have not been able to tie any of the detainees to the drug discovery. Yes, some were charged with keeping unlicensed firearm and ammunition and that was shared to you all over the weekend. And those against whom we had no evidence, the foreigners were issued with OTL and some were charged with immigration offences and they went to court this morning."

Reporter
"In terms of the owner of the Prado..."

Chester Williams
"That investigation is still ongoing."

Jules Vasquez
"Sir, is it a matter of frustration for the department that you all know intuitively, instinctively and factually that these persons were involved in a conspiracy to transship drugs through Belize but because of the nature of constructive evidence, that you must have, you are unable to bring charges."

Chester Williams
"We cannot take people to court based on our intuition. We are a country of laws and the rule of law is paramount and so if the evidence is not there to link anybody to whatever crime we believe they may have committed then the legal and the appropriate thing to do is to release them from custody. I don't see any failure or any incompetence on the part of the police to have been able to, like you said, cross the T's and dot the I's. It is a matter that these people were not found in the immediate vicinity of these drugs and so that is how it works. I wouldn't want to say that they get away scotch free but if the drugs were theirs then they surely have lost a huge amount of their products."

Jules Vasquez
"Should law enforcement have bided its time more patiently and waited until the suspects went, as they would have inevitably, to that location of the coastal highway where hundreds of kilos of cocaine were waiting for them."

Chester Williams
"Well, Jules, again, in hindsight we can say whatever but we were not there. We don't know what prompted the officers to have acted at that particular moment."