Gail Alexan­der

The Op­po­si­tion PNM's In­ter­net Web sites had re­ceived abu­sive, racist com­ments from an en­ti­ty, us­ing the name "Jan­ice Thomas," be­fore and af­ter last year's gen­er­al elec­tion and up to re­cent­ly dur­ing the Resh­mi Ram­nar­ine is­sue, says PN­MTV's Dane Wil­son.Wil­son first spoke about the sit­u­a­tion in Feb­ru­ary when the par­ty's me­dia unit-Face­book and Twit­ter group-known as "PN­MTV", was at­tacked on the In­ter­net.

This oc­curred af­ter PN­MTV post­ed pic­tures of Ram­nar­ine, the PM's events ad­vis­er Sasha Mo­hammed and Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Tim Gopeesingh dur­ing the height of the Ram­nar­ine mat­ter. News re­ports in var­i­ous me­dia had shown the pic­tures of Gopeesingh, Ram­nar­ine and Mo­hammed. Around the same time the In­ter­net at­tack on PN­MTV took place, Ex­press work­ers had re­port­ed an e-mail at­tack.Yes­ter­day, Wil­son said: "An en­ti­ty, un­der the name of 'Jan­ice Thomas', has at­tacked peo­ple on PNM's Face­book page, fan­page and PN­Mites' per­son­al pages on a num­ber of oc­ca­sions."The 'Thomas en­ti­ty' used to be very ac­tive be­fore and af­ter the 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion with com­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly about Man­ning (for­mer PM) and Hart (for­mer Ude­cott head, Calder).

"The en­ti­ty al­so would say Kei­th Row­ley was the on­ly one with guts to chal­lenge Man­ning and the per­sona of­ten called Man­ning an 'ego­ma­ni­ac'"Af­ter we blocked the en­ti­ty from our fan­page, the en­ti­ty then sent peo­ple, my­self in­clud­ed, mes­sages, pri­vate­ly, call­ing us racist terms, us­ing ob­scene lan­guage and threat­en­ing."Wil­son said the most re­cent com­ment from the en­ti­ty was dur­ing the Ram­nar­ine is­sue when the pic­tures of Mo­hammed, Gopeesingh and Ram­nar­ine were put up.He said: "Those were pic­tures which al­ready had been used in me­dia re­ports on the Ram­nar­ine is­sue but I got mes­sages say­ing I was putting up peo­ple's per­son­al pic­tures.

"One day some of the pic­tures start­ed dis­ap­pear­ing since Face­book had re­moved them for some strange rea­son."I then re­ceived a call from a woman, who did not iden­ti­fy her­self, telling me not to put up pic­tures of Mo­hammed, Ram­nar­ine and oth­ers again be­cause if I thought I was "suf­fer­ing for work now, I would suf­fer more over the next five years."Wil­son said he re­port­ed the sit­u­a­tion to the PNM's gen­er­al sec­re­tary who told him to let him know the next time the sit­u­a­tion oc­curred, since the PNM would take it very se­ri­ous­ly. He said Row­ley (po­lit­i­cal leader of the PNM) al­so was in­formed of the sit­u­a­tion.

He said fol­low­ing news re­ports of the "ter­ror­ism" (sic) of PNM's me­dia unit, the en­ti­ty stopped com­ment­ing as did oth­er pro­files which would com­ment along with the Thomas per­sona.He gave the names of these as "Karen Khan" and "Crys­tal Sankar".Wil­son added: "We is­sued an alert to mem­bers to delete those names and we haven't seen the 'Sankar' or the 'Thomas' per­sona."The 'Thomas' en­ti­ty dis­ap­peared af­ter a re­port­ed e-mail at­tack on the Ex­press ear­li­er this year. The 'Khan' pro­file is still up, though silent."The 'Khan' per­sona had giv­en PNM a lot of in­for­ma­tion on Jack Warn­er about FI­FA is­sues, Sim­paul mat­ters and oth­er things," Wil­son added. See Page A6