(Trinidad Guardian) Special state prosecutor Dana Seetahal was murdered by a trans-national drug organisation with operations in T&T, says the United States Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield. Speaking from Washington, DC, in a teleconference with Caribbean journalists on Tuesday, Ambassador Brownfield said: “Those in Trinidad would know that I visited your country two months ago and two days after I left there was the brutal murder of Ms Dana Seetahal. She was murdered by a trans-national drug organisation.”
Asked by the T&T Guardian to elaborate on this suggestion, Brownfield, who has responsibility for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, said: “I stand by everything I have said. This was clearly not a crime of passion. “It was not a crime of opportunity where someone felt they should steal her handbag and then found they had to shoot her. “This was a well planned and orchestrated hit. “This is not something you plan easily. It is organised crime with an international player that has a crime organisation with presence in T&T.”
On May 4, Seetahal was shot dead just outside the Woodbrook Youth Facility on Hamilton Holder Street as she was on her way to her apartment at One Woodbrook Place after leaving the Ma Pau casino on Ariapita Avenue, Port-of-Spain. Residents reported hearing a volley of gunshots followed by screeching tyres. By the time they contacted police and ran outside to check, they found Seetahal slumped over the steering wheel of her light blue Volkswagen Touareg. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Acting Police Commissioner Stephen Williams has publicly said the police knew how and why Seetahal was killed but thus far, 53 days after her killing, no one has been charged with her murder. On Tuesday, Brownfield said Seetahal’s murder could not be seen as “just another statistic,” explaining that Seetahal had partnered with the US government on several issues, had been the beneficiary of a Fulbright scholarship from the US government, and was, in his words, “a star, a woman of tremendous courage.”
Reached in England on Tuesday night National Security Minister Gary Griffith said he preferred not to comment.
On the issue of extra-judicial killings, he said if there was evidence that the police service was involved in such killing in any country, by law, the US would have to discontinue co-operation with the organisation. He explained that was currently the situation with the St Lucian police and that was why co-operation with that country had been suspended. Brownfield said that was unfortunate because the move not only hurt St Lucia but the region as a whole.
Allegations of extra-judicial killings have been made against the T&T Police Service by members of the public after the recent spate of police shootings. So far this year, 29 people have been killed by the police in T&T.
