Trinidad taxi man killed during apparent robbery

(Trinidad Guardian) A 47-year-old taxi dri­ver was killed dur­ing an ap­par­ent rob­bery,on Thursday.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, Ken­neth Par­ris, of Lyn­don Street, Curepe, was last seen alive around 2 am on Thurs­day when he left Port-of-Spain to trans­port pas­sen­gers to San Juan.

Short­ly af­ter de­part­ing, Par­ris crashed his car at the round­about at the Mar­itime fly­over, in Barataria.

Emer­gency Health Ser­vices (EHS) per­son­nel, who re­spond­ed to the scene, dis­cov­ered that Par­ris had been shot four times.

He was tak­en to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal where he re­mained ward­ed in the In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) un­til he suc­cumbed to his in­juries around 9.30 am.

Par­ris’ body was then trans­ferred to the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in St James where a post-mortem was per­formed.

Po­lice be­lieve that Par­ris may have been killed af­ter he chal­lenged his at­tack­ers, who posed as pas­sen­gers. They al­so sus­pect that his at­tack­ers fled the scene af­ter the crash.

Par­ris’ ve­hi­cle is ex­pect­ed to be dust­ed for fin­ger­prints and searched for oth­er foren­sic ev­i­dence which may as­sist po­lice in de­ter­min­ing the iden­ti­ties of his at­tack­ers.

Mean­while, po­lice are in­ves­ti­gat­ing the mur­der of a man, who was killed dur­ing an ap­par­ent kid­nap­ping at­tempt on Tues­day night.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, El­don Roop­nar­ine, 37, of Ojar Maraj Av­enue, Brick­field, and his girl­friend Nee­ta Nar­ine were parked at the Wa­ter­loo Cre­ma­tion Site, when they were re­port­ed­ly ap­proached by a group of men, who pre­tend­ed to be ask­ing for a spare cig­a­rette.

The men al­leged­ly pulled the cou­ple from the car, threw Roop­nar­ine in the trunk, tied Nar­ine’s hands and placed her in the back-seat.

Af­ter dri­ving a short dis­tance, Roop­nar­ine re­port­ed­ly man­aged to es­cape from the trunk and jumped out on to the road.

The men stopped the car, got out and re­port­ed­ly slammed Roop­nar­ine’s head against the road be­fore putting him back in the trunk.

The men then drove to a forest­ed area where they aban­doned the cou­ple. Nar­ine sought help at a vil­lager’s home. Af­ter giv­ing a re­port on what tran­spired to po­lice, she then ac­com­pa­nied them to find her boyfriend’s body.

Roop­nar­ine’s car was even­tu­al­ly found aban­doned in Wa­ter­loo.