Sascha Wil­son

De­scrib­ing se­r­i­al bur­glar Narvin Ba­boolal as a ter­ror­ist, a mag­is­trate yes­ter­day sen­tenced him to 13 years and nine months in jail on ten charges. "You are the worst. You are a ter­ror­ist, break­ing in­to peo­ple's homes all about," Deputy Chief Mag­is­trate Mark Welling­ton told Ba­boolal in the San Fer­nan­do First Mag­is­trates Court.

If T&T were Su­dan, the mag­is­trate told him, he would have had his right hand and left foot cut off. "Un­for­tu­nate­ly, I can­not make that ex­tra­di­tion or­der," the mag­is­trate added. Ba­boolal, 34, who was ar­rest­ed on May 17, 2012, on­ly plead­ed guilty to the charges 1on Old Year's Day.

The charges in­clud­ed five counts of house­break­ing and lar­ce­ny, two counts of store break­ing and lar­ce­ny, in­ter­fer­ing with a ve­hi­cle, pos­ses­sion of co­caine and pos­ses­sion of a de­vice. Dur­ing his crime spree be­tween April and May 2012, Ba­boolal stole over $160,000 worth of elec­tron­ic de­vices, com­put­ers, clothes, shoes, jew­el­ry, tools, al­co­hol and oth­er items.

Ba­boolal tar­get­ed busi­ness­es and hous­es in ar­eas of Har­mo­ny Hall, Re­form Vil­lage and Gas­par­il­lo. Ba­boolal asked for le­nien­cy, say­ing he stole be­cause he had owed "some fel­las" mon­ey for a Fron­tier van. "You are an ad­dict. You stole to fu­el your drug ad­dic­tion," Welling­ton said, not­ing that Ba­boolal had six con­vic­tions for nar­cotics and lar­ce­ny over the past ten years.

Ba­boolal, how­ev­er, who has ad­dress­es in Clax­ton Bay, Tu­na­puna, Re­form Vil­lage and Ari­ma, would on­ly serve 24 months as the sen­tences were or­dered to run con­cur­rent­ly. The mag­is­trate al­so com­mend­ed the po­lice of­fi­cers in­volved in the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, in­clud­ing de­tec­tive Con­sta­ble Ter­rance Rahim, Con­sta­ble Mahin­dra Gadoo and Con­sta­ble Ram­baran of the Gas­par­il­lo Po­lice Sta­tion.