Charles Kong Soo

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er says Gov­ern­ment will wel­come any as­sis­tance or equip­ment from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment in the war against crime. He was speak­ing in an in­ter­view af­ter the hand­ing-over cer­e­mo­ny of med­ical equip­ment do­nat­ed by the Peo­ple's Re­pub­lic of Chi­na to the T&T De­fence Force at the Ul­ric Cross Air Sta­tion, Gold­en Grove Road, Pi­ar­co yes­ter­day.

Al­so present at the event were Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Collin Par­tap, Chief of De­fence Staff, Brigadier Gen­er­al Ken­rick Ma­haraj, and Chi­nese Am­bas­sador to T&T, Yang Youm­ing. "If the Chi­nese of­fer us equip­ment to pa­trol our wa­ters, we shall take them, wher­ev­er they come from so as to make our bor­ders less porous," Warn­er said. "The Chi­nese have been help­ing the De­fence Force as ear­ly as 1999 when they gave the first sup­ply of equip­ment at a cost of $1.5 mil­lion," said Warn­er.

"From 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006, and 2007 the Chi­nese have been bring­ing equip­ment and as­sis­tance to the De­fence Force on a reg­u­lar ba­sis and to­day's do­na­tion of $13 mil­lion in equip­ment is part of that con­tin­ued good re­la­tion­ship be­tween the Re­pub­lic of Chi­na and this gov­ern­ment, coun­try and more­so the De­fence Force." He al­so promised that the per­sons re­spon­si­ble for the mur­der of Chi­nese na­tion­als, Yang Jian Hua and his wife Wu Xiu Hua, in Cunu­pia, will be caught though it may take a "long time."

Warn­er said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was too sen­si­tive to dis­close, how­ev­er the po­lice had giv­en him the as­sur­ance that the cul­prits will be ap­pre­hend­ed. He said he met with Youm­ing who was very con­cerned about the mat­ter. Youm­ing said, "We've been in touch with the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty about the is­sue. We've ex­pressed our con­cerns about the Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ty here and the min­is­ter has demon­strat­ed that they're very con­cerned and they will take all the nec­es­sary mea­sures to have jus­tice done."

When asked if he knew about any re­ports of Chi­nese na­tion­als leav­ing the coun­try, Youm­ing said the fam­i­ly of the mur­dered cou­ple will be tak­ing the cre­mat­ed re­mains of their par­ents back to Chi­na but at this point he did not know whether they would be re­turn­ing.