On July 6th, according to CCTV video footage seen by Stabroek News, businessman Safraz Khan drove his car onto a bridge on Austin Street to enter his yard when another car came from a southerly direction; stopped and opened fire on his. One person then rushed over to Mr Khan’s vehicle and opened fire at him. A fusillade followed. The gunman was decked out in a yellow raincoat with a hood. The getaway vehicle drove down the street and the gunman ran after it and jumped into the front seat after a little bit of effort.
According to the police, as Mr Khan turned into his entrance and stopped, the motorcar stopped, and the suspect immediately exited the front passenger seat with a gun and approached his vehicle. On seeing that, the businessman, who was armed with his licensed pistol, said he discharged rounds in the suspect’s direction.
The suspect also discharged rounds at the victim, after which the suspect ran and entered the front passenger seat, and the vehicle drove away at a fast rate.
Detectives, the police said, processed the scene, and twenty-seven .223 spent shells were recovered and thirteen 9mm spent shells were retrieved from in the victim’s car.
It was clear from the events of July 6 that the gunman in the yellow raincoat had intended to kill Mr Khan. More than 10 days later the public has no idea about the gunman or the driver of the getaway car even though the vehicle had been found abandoned.
The attempted ‘hit’ by the man in yellow falls into a category of high crime that the police are wholly incapable of solving or do not want to. With modern methods of detection and surveillance there are any number of leads that the police can pursue in tracking down the two occupants of the vehicle. From the wearing of the garish rain coat to the retrieval of DNA evidence from the getaway car, the law enforcement authorities have a broad canvas on which to sketch the details of the crime and to snare the perpetrators.
That does not however seem to be on the cards. Even though they are in possession of the getaway car, the police seem completely clueless about the perpetrators or at least they seem so. If there had been a qualitative improvement in policing over the last decade or so, immediately after the shooting there would have been extensive tracking of escape routes for the perpetrators through the state’s supposedly ubiquitous cameras. There would have also been an examination of the motives for this attack to enable a better focusing of the investigation. It appears that none of this happened as 10 days after, the trail appears to have gone stone cold and the apparently contracted gunman is roaming freely.
It is not an unfamiliar situation at all. The best known of such incidents in recent years was the gunning down outside of Palm Court of Ricardo Fagundes known as ‘Paper shorts’ on March 21, 2021. If one had taken a bet that night that the execution-style killing would not be solved they would have been completely in order. Despite access to a treasure trove of leads the police failed to deliver the two killers to the justice system.
The getaway car made it all the way from Main Street to Swan on the Soesdyke/Linden Highway without being intercepted. Despite the fact that the getaway vehicle was burnt to destroy evidence, there should have been sufficient indicators to trace the vehicle back to its owner who would have then had some explaining to do. The two gunmen also remain at large. The use of high-powered weapons to kill Mr Fagundes – though he might not have been the intended target – was also another marker of the scale of crime committed. Weapons of that type denote big names in the underworld who are untouchable.
The dereliction of the police In this investigation eventually led to the allegations by policeman Dion Bascom that there had been a massive cover-up by the police to protect a businessman.
There clearly were sufficient leads for the police to crack the ‘Paper shorts’ case, their failure to make headway would be attributed to interference at various levels and corruption. The same fate appears to await the case of the gunman in the yellow raincoat.
If the government and the police force want to secure the trust of the people, then they must be able to solve cases like those of Mr Fagundes and the one on Austin Street on July 6th. These failures signal corruption, incompetence or incapacity.
On Friday, Trinidad Prime Minister Keith Rowley expressed his frustration at the corruption level in the police force.
According to the Trinidad Express, he said that he is willing to pay more to police officers to be part of “vetted units” reserved for officers of the highest integrity. Prime Minister Rowley said this proposal is necessary because “there are too many criminals in the police service.”
“I was in a meeting with the Minister of National Security and our experts and the American experts where the American government has undertaken and we have agreed to accept it, to create within our police service, what we call vetted units. Vetted units, meaning groups of special police officers, men and women who are vetted to ensure that their integrity is intact”, he told his audience.
“When you’re going after the non-police criminals, they have their friends in the police service, to tip them off. And we have to have vetted units,” he explained. “I’m telling this country that we are prepared to pay extra to police officers in those vetted units if they will maintain their integrity and help us to root out the criminals in the police service, in the customs, in immigration…”, he said.
The egregious failures over the years by the police may well require vetted units, rigorous use of body cameras and professional leadership.