Trinidad: Kidnapped UWI staffer rescued, suspects in custody

(Trinidad Guardian) Rad­hi­ca Dass, the moth­er of res­cued kid­nap vic­tim Maria Dass-Su­per­sad, last night thanked Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith for the quick and ef­fi­cient work on his men.

“I’m very hap­py. I’m so hap­py and Gary Grif­fith did his job again and I must con­grat­u­late him for be­ing tops and solv­ing this crime,” the el­der Dass said when the T&T Guardian con­tact­ed her to ask if they had been giv­en the news that Dass-Su­per­sad had been found safe and in good health.

Dass-Su­per­sad was res­cued by po­lice some five hours af­ter two men forced her in­to a car while she was try­ing to leave The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) St Au­gus­tine cam­pus to pick up her daugh­ter.

Dass-Su­per­sad, 26, was res­cued un­harmed from a car dri­ven by her kid­nap­pers along the Cau­ra Road around 8.30pm. Two men were tak­en in­to po­lice cus­tody, one wear­ing a po­lice bul­let­proof vest and the oth­er in cam­ou­flage wear they were wear­ing dur­ing the ab­duc­tion.

Grif­fith last night told Guardian Me­dia that he mo­bilised all arms of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice af­ter learn­ing of Dass-Su­per­sad’s kid­nap­ping yes­ter­day evening.

“As soon as the kid­nap­ping took place I ig­nit­ed the op­er­a­tions com­mand cen­tre and I mo­bilised all the rel­e­vant units, sim­i­lar to what I did for Na­tal­ie Pol­lon­ais’ kid­nap­ping,” Grif­fith said.

Among the arms of the TTPS in­volved were the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse team, An­ti Kid­nap­ping Unit, the in­tel­li­gence units, Spe­cial Branch, North­ern Di­vi­sion and the In­ter Agency Task Force.

“We were able to com­bine all our re­sources and in­for­ma­tion that we had, up­on which we were able to pin­point and tar­get the per­pe­tra­tors, we were able to zone in on them. We con­duct­ed an op­er­a­tion, I gave the call, they were in­ter­cept­ed, we were able to ex­tract her from kid­nap­pers.”

He said Dass-Su­per­sad was in good health and would have un­der­gone a ba­sic med­ical check-up last night.

He al­so had some stern words for so­cial me­dia crit­ics, say­ing they seemed to be ‘gun­ning’ for some­thing to go wrong in Dass-Su­per­sad’s case.

“I was a bit dis­ap­point­ed that there were cer­tain in­di­vid­u­als who would have writ­ten on so­cial me­dia. It seems some peo­ple were gun­ning in an­tic­i­pa­tion that this would have gone wrong be­cause you were hear­ing com­ments along the line of let us see if they will put as much em­pha­sis as they did on Na­tal­ie Pol­lon­ais as they would for this in­di­vid­ual,” Grif­fith said.

“For all of those peo­ple on so­cial me­dia that were mak­ing those base­less un­ac­cept­able com­ments, they now get egg on their faces be­cause the same ef­fort, the same mo­bil­i­sa­tion that we did for Pol­lon­ais, I was able to mo­bilise the same amount of peo­ple, units, in­tel­li­gence, the same amount of pro­fes­sion­al op­er­a­tions to en­sure that Ms Dass al­so came out un­harmed and I think it was rather taste­less that peo­ple would try to use so­cial me­dia to try to give the im­pres­sion that the po­lice would be bi­ased in how they deal with cit­i­zens of this coun­try.”

He al­so sought to as­sure the pop­u­la­tion that while he is at the helm of the TTPS the same ef­forts would be ap­plied to every case.

“Whilst I re­main as CoP each and every cit­i­zen of this coun­try will be giv­en my 100 per cent ef­fort in every form and fash­ion, my­self and the po­lice ser­vice do not see race, class, ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tion, eth­nic com­po­si­tion, we don’t see po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion.”