Gail Alexan­der

Five mem­bers of T&T's Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty de­tained in Venezuela since March are ex­pect­ed to have a hear­ing be­fore Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties next Tues­day.Nafeesa Mo­hammed, who is as­sist­ing the fam­i­lies of the five, con­firmed this on Wednes­day.The five, Wade Charles, Do­minic Piti­lal, Asim Luq­man, An­dre Bat­ters­by and Leslie Dais­ley, were de­tained un­der an­ti-ter­ror­ism laws af­ter Venezue­lan in­tel­li­gence agency Se­bin raid­ed their Cara­cas ho­tel rooms.

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar re­cent­ly said no pres­sure would be placed on Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties to re­lease the five and that the Gov­ern­ment is do­ing all it can in a re­spon­si­ble way.Mo­hammed, an at­tor­ney, said the five had a hear­ing with a judge on Tues­day, but this was de­ferred to next week. She said rep­re­sen­ta­tions had been made to the Gov­ern­ment on the is­sue ear­li­er and in­for­ma­tion about the de­tainees, in­clud­ing that they had no pre­vi­ous con­vic­tions, was sent to the au­thor­i­ties.

"I pray for the re­lease of our five na­tion­als in Cara­cas," she told the T&T Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view."I re­al­ly hope our Gov­ern­ment has been able to di­a­logue with the Venezue­lans to con­vince them that these men are not ter­ror­ists."Mo­hammed al­so spoke about oth­er T&T na­tion­als who were de­tained in Venezuela in March and sub­se­quent­ly re­leased.

"Hav­ing been asked by rel­a­tives to as­sist since the be­gin­ning of this most un­just and bizarre sit­u­a­tion, I have no­ticed a promi­nent jour­nal­ist in our coun­try per­sis­tent­ly try­ing to link these na­tion­als to a glob­al move­ment of Mus­lim ex­trem­ists head­ing to Syr­ia as ji­hadists," she said.

"I can­not help but be­lieve that there is a ca­bal op­er­at­ing that seems to be de­ter­mined to link these de­tainees to ne­far­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties else­where. I have been in­struct­ed that these na­tion­als went to Cara­cas to ob­tain visas to trav­el to Sau­di Ara­bia to per­form the Um­rah..."She ad­vised the jour­nal­ist and the lo­cal me­dia to get the facts on the case be­fore go­ing with sto­ries.

"Based on my in­struc­tions, I have every rea­son to be­lieve these men are in­no­cent of the al­le­ga­tions made against them that they are ter­ror­ists. This in­ter­na­tion­al hype in the West­ern world against Mus­lims needs to be analysed care­ful­ly."Mo­hammed al­so said the au­thor­i­ties in T&T "need to un­der­stand the make­up and com­po­si­tion of the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty be­fore jump­ing to con­clu­sions based on me­dia hype and sen­sa­tion­al­ism."

She al­so warned, "Most im­por­tant­ly, the lead­er­ship in the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty needs to wake up and smell the cof­fee. We need to work with the au­thor­i­ties to en­sure that we are re­spect­ing the laws of the land."Our Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty is very di­verse and we need to en­sure our young ones do not be­come caught up in re­li­gious fa­nati­cism that read­i­ly lends it­self to rad­i­cal­ism and ex­trem­ism."