Trinidad: Electronic device found following parkade explosion

By Stabroek News On In Trinidad & Tobago News |
Workers from various offices gather at the corner of Queen Janelle Commissiong and St Vincent Streets, Port-of Spain, after buildings near the Government Campus Parkade were evacuated following an explosion at the facility yesterday.
Workers from various offices gather at the corner of Queen Janelle Commissiong and St Vincent Streets, Port-of Spain, after buildings near the Government Campus Parkade were evacuated following an explosion at the facility yesterday.

(Trinidad Guardian) Po­lice have con­firmed that an elec­tron­ic de­vice was re­cov­ered at the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus’ Parkade fol­low­ing an ex­plo­sion yes­ter­day.

In a re­lease, the po­lice said the de­vice was dis­cov­ered “on the west­ern side of the build­ing.”

How­ev­er, no fur­ther in­for­ma­tion was giv­en by the po­lice on the na­ture of the de­vice, nor its role in yes­ter­day’s ex­plo­sion.

Se­nior po­lice of­fi­cials told Guardian Me­dia in­ves­ti­ga­tions are on­go­ing.

 

They al­so in­di­cat­ed that a sec­ond de­vice was found, how­ev­er, this was not con­firmed.

There were “no re­port­ed in­juries nor dam­age to prop­er­ty or ve­hi­cles.”

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice, an ex­plo­sion was heard around 8 am fol­low­ing which mem­bers of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice, in­clud­ing the Ex­plo­sive De­tec­tion and Dis­pos­al Unit and Fire Ser­vices, re­spond­ed.

A three and a half-hour long search was con­duct­ed and the de­vice was dis­cov­ered. Com­ment­ing on the mat­ter, Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith not­ed that it took three hours af­ter the ex­plo­sion for the parkade em­ploy­ees to in­form the emer­gency per­son­nel. He ad­vised that, in such in­stances, peo­ple should al­ways err on the side of cau­tion and im­me­di­ate­ly in­form the emer­gency ser­vices.

Di­vi­sion­al fire of­fi­cer and bomb tech­ni­cian John Harp­er told Guardian Me­dia that all pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sures were tak­en. This in­clud­ed evac­u­at­ing the parkade and sur­round­ing build­ings. This in­clud­ed work­ers from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion as well as the var­i­ous min­istries con­tained in the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus who all con­gre­gat­ed along the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade.

The area be­tween In­de­pen­dence Square North and Queen St be­tween Ed­ward St and Rich­mond Street was cor­doned off while po­lice of­fi­cers man­aged the flow of both ve­hic­u­lar and pedes­tri­an traf­fic around the area. This sub­se­quent­ly led to mod­er­ate to heavy traf­fic con­ges­tion along Wright­son Road.

Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Don­na Cox al­so sent out a state­ment fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent.

She ac­knowl­edged that they re­ceived re­ports of the in­ci­dent and ad­vised mem­bers of the pub­lic to co­op­er­ate with the se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel on the ground and fur­ther ad­vised peo­ple to re­frain from ven­tur­ing in­to the area.