Se­cu­ri­ty forces re­cov­ered six guns and 825 rounds of am­mu­ni­tion from five "hot spots" on Mon­day, says act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams. At a me­dia brief­ing at the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, Williams said they were re­cov­ered in Diego Mar­tin, Mar­aval, Ari­ma, Ch­agua­nas and San Fer­nan­do. He al­so con­firmed two teenagers had been ar­rest­ed in Paramin in con­nec­tion with a Jan­u­ary homi­cide and four peo­ple were ar­rest­ed in re­la­tion to stolen ve­hi­cles. Williams was al­so asked about re­ports of a fa­ther and son who were in­jured in a 4 am at­tack at their home on Toma­to Trace, Diego Mar­tin, on Mon­day. That would have oc­curred dur­ing the 9 pm to 5 am cur­few in that "hot spot" area.

Williams said he would look in­to the re­port to ver­i­fy it. He said there had been a height­ened po­lice pres­ence in that area.

He said se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies were tar­get­ing the re­cov­ery of guns and drugs and fo­cus­ing on dri­ving down homi­cides. Williams de­clined to iden­ti­fy the op­er­a­tions of se­cu­ri­ty forces, say­ing it would be fool­hardy to do so. Asked if he felt the "big fish" would lay low dur­ing the state of emer­gency and thwart the ex­er­cise's re­sults, Williams said the pub­lic would be left to judge from the re­sults. Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter John Sandy said the Gov­ern­ment would con­tin­ue to go af­ter the crim­i­nals if the crime rate con­tin­ued af­ter the state of emer­gency end­ed. He said the spe­cial tri­bunal to hear griev­ances of peo­ple re­gard­ing is­sues in the state of emer­gency would have been in place by the end of yes­ter­day. He said the tri­bunal was fi­nalised in a meet­ing on Mon­day with Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan said a con­tin­gency plan had been for­mu­lat­ed, along­side the state of emer­gency, re­gard­ing pro­tec­tion of coastal bor­ders to pre­vent more guns from be­ing brought in­to T&T.

He and Williams urged the pub­lic to re­port in­for­ma­tion on crim­i­nal el­e­ments. Ram­lo­gan added: "This is your time Trinidad and To­ba­go. All those of you who had whined and bit­ter­ly com­plained and ques­tioned what they were do­ing... giv­en that you know what is go­ing on in your own back­yard, your vil­lage or your com­mu­ni­ty. "So any­one with in­for­ma­tion con­cern­ing crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty and about crime tak­ing place in your com­mu­ni­ty, you know the num­bers of the Crime Stop­pers and the po­lice... this is your time. "We have cre­at­ed a win­dow of op­por­tu­ni­ty for each cit­i­zen to stand up and par­tic­i­pate in the fight against crime. This is your time, make use of it wise­ly." Apart from pos­si­ble ex­ten­sions of the state of emer­gency, Ram­lo­gan said there were oth­er op­tions, in­clud­ing tar­get­ting spe­cif­ic ar­eas or im­pos­ing a cur­few on spe­cif­ic in­di­vid­u­als.