Ak­ile Si­mon

Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er James Philbert is urg­ing Co­di Alves, the lone sur­vivor of fa­tal po­lice killings, which left three of his friends dead, in Mor­vant on Oc­to­ber 1, to come for­ward and help in­ves­ti­ga­tors with the probe. Philbert said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the killing of Ker­win "Lal" Joseph, 24, Akee Ca­ballero, 32, and Joel Ro­main, 19, all of Cipri­ani Av­enue, Sec­ond Cale­do­nia, Mor­vant, was on-go­ing. The act­ing top cop was re­spond­ing to Alves' claims that he saw po­lice of­fi­cers mur­der his friends. Alves al­so al­leged he was in the car at the time of the shoot­ing and pre­tend­ed he was dead to stay alive. Philbert spoke dur­ing an in­ter­view fol­low­ing the pro­mo­tion of 24 First Di­vi­sion of­fi­cers at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion Build­ing, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

He said: "The in­quiry will even­tu­al­ly be sub­mit­ted for con­sid­er­a­tion to the DPP who will de­cide whether an in­quest should take place or not. "Aris­ing from what ap­peared in the Guardian to­day (yes­ter­day), I un­der­stand that per­son (Alves), from his po­si­tion, seemed to be a wit­ness in the mat­ter. "The po­lice will have to in­ter­view him and I hope he makes him­self avail­able for that in­ter­view, so we will be able to add some val­ue to the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, which will be ex­treme­ly fair." Philbert said all con­sid­er­a­tion would be giv­en to what Alves or any oth­er per­son, who may have claimed to wit­ness the in­ci­dent, once they were in­ter­viewed by in­ves­ti­ga­tors.

He said he was yet to re­ceive an of­fi­cial re­port on the in­ci­dent. Mean­while, of­fi­cers of the North East­ern Di­vi­sion have ex­pressed shock over Alves' ver­sion of what hap­pened that night. Of­fi­cers claimed af­ter the ex­change of gun­fire be­tween them­selves and the oc­cu­pants of a B-14 mo­tor­car, Alves crawled out of the ve­hi­cle, placed his hands in the air and sur­ren­dered. They said Alves was tak­en to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal af­ter he suf­fered from shock. Se­nior po­lice sources said a few days af­ter Alves was dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal, he re­fused to give in­ves­ti­ga­tors a state­ment, say­ing that he did not see any­thing.