CANU deputy head executed
By Kim Lucas
Second in command of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU), Vibert Inniss, was gunned down early yesterday morning when he stopped to purchase newspapers at Buxton on the East Coast Demerara.
It was another blow to the government’s efforts at controlling a crime splurge and is likely to put further pressure on it to take decisive action.
Inniss had left his Melanie Damishana home, just a few villages away, sometime after 6 am and was in his car, PHH 6436, parked in front of the vendor’s shop when he was shot.
No one in the immediate vicinity was willing to speak about the incident but an eyewitness who was passing at the time told this newspaper that he saw Inniss’ car stop at the shop and he heard the law enforcer sound his car horn. The man said less than a minute after he passed the car, rapid gunshots reverberated in the area.
He dashed for cover and looked back. He saw two men standing next to Inniss’ car, firing at the law enforcement officer.
“I just see two armed gunmen…The two were outside the car [and] the shots start pelting. Rapid, rapid. After the shooting, I just see he [Inniss] alone in the car and he sprawl off, dead,” the man recalled. A number of other sources said a young woman was in the vehicle with the slain law enforcer. She was not, however, injured in the attack, sources said.
Another person said she was working some distance away when she looked up and spotted the gunmen standing beside Inniss’ car. One of them was “tall”.
“He [Inniss] did blow and ask for papers, by the time the boy go inside, the two men was already on the road, pointing the gun at the car, so I just dash back inside. They was in front the car…one was at the side, he had a machine gun in he hand,” the woman said.
Other sources said that prior to the shooting, a white car was seen trailing Inniss. It reportedly stopped behind him, and two men, who alighted, opened fire, killing the law enforcer. No one reported seeing the licence plate of the gunmen’s car.
When Stabroek News arrived on the scene, a huge crowd had gathered and police investigators were collecting spent shells strewn on the roadway. The army and police had already thrown up a roadblock in an effort to control the area for investigators. Sometime after 8 am, Inniss’ body was placed into a waiting hearse, and his bullet-riddled car was driven to the Vigilance Police Station, just a stone’s throw away from where the shooting occurred.
There were three bullet holes in the front windshield of the vehicle and a large one on the left, front passenger door. The rear, right side window, too, was shattered. Blood, was splattered in the car on the driver’s seat and hand-brake.
The eastern post of the newspaper vendor’s home was also pierced by a bullet while the galvanised gutter attached to the roof of a flat building next door was penetrated.
One senior CANU official told Stabroek News last night that Inniss’ death was “a very severe, blow” to the drugs interdiction unit. He described the slain law enforcer as the “livewire of the unit and the main action man.” He could not, however, say whether Inniss had been receiving threats recently. CANU Head Bernard Trueman is out of the country and could not be reached for comment yesterday.
This was the second major assault on CANU this month. Early on the morning of August 8, gunmen sprayed CANU’s Homestretch Avenue head office with bullets, before lobbing two grenades into the compound. The building and several vehicles were damaged. No one was reported injured during that attack, the first of its kind for the drug-busting unit since the country was gripped by a legion of robberies, murders, shootings and hijackings following the February 23 jail- break by five men.
After that attack earlier this month, the police had in a release said that three CANU ranks were on duty at the time when a white motor car pulled up and a gunman exited and opened fire at the building.
Inniss, who had been employed with CANU since the launch of the organisation in 1995, is the ninth law enforcement officer to be gunned down since April. Eight policemen have so far been killed.
