Hours af­ter the pas­tor of the Bethel ‘The House of God’ in Freeport made the de­ci­sion to sus­pend ser­vices in­def­i­nite­ly and not pro­ceed with the planned wed­dings at the church’s com­pound to­day, they re­ceived a bomb threat.Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion reach­ing the Guardian Me­dia, some­time af­ter 3 pm yes­ter­day po­lice of­fi­cers re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that some­one had threat­ened “to blow the church up.”

A par­ty of po­lice of­fi­cers led by Supt Wayne Mys­tar re­spond­ed to the scene at Cal­cut­ta #2 in Freeport at about 4 pm along with the T&T Fire Ser­vice and an am­bu­lance.

Mys­tar and the fire of­fi­cials met and spoke with church of­fi­cials who were al­ready on the com­pound and in­formed them about what was hap­pen­ing. A few min­utes lat­er, a snif­fer dog was tak­en on­to the com­pound to de­tect if any ex­plo­sives had been plant­ed in the church build­ing.

Mys­tar con­firmed with the Guardian Me­dia that they were re­spond­ing to “just…a threat of a bomb.”

When Guardian Me­dia got there at 3.45 pm, how­ev­er, church of­fi­cials claimed they had no in­for­ma­tion on any bomb threat and ques­tioned why the me­dia was there.

Asked if they had any of­fi­cial event or gath­er­ing tak­ing place at the near­by camp ground, which is lo­cat­ed op­po­site to the church com­pound, where sev­er­al peo­ple were seen sit­ting un­der a shed, a church of­fi­cial said no. He fur­ther ex­plained that the peo­ple there at the time were mak­ing arrange­ments to cook food to mark the end of their an­nu­al week-long ac­tiv­i­ties and memo­r­i­al ser­vices.

On Thurs­day night, Pas­tor Dal­ton Bruce re­fused to speak to mem­bers of the me­dia and po­lice of­fi­cers who showed up dur­ing their an­nu­al memo­r­i­al ser­vices event, af­ter res­i­dents raised con­cerns over the scores of peo­ple gath­ered at the church for the event in light of the COVID-19 out­break. The po­lice al­lowed the event to con­tin­ue de­spite the ad­vice by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley that all so­cial gath­er­ings fea­ture no more than 10 peo­ple.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment sent by Bruce on Fri­day, he said ini­tial­ly that ser­vices were not clos­ing off. Dur­ing a ser­vice on Fri­day night, how­ev­er, he an­nounced that all ser­vices would be sus­pend­ed un­til fur­ther no­tice but that four pre-planned wed­dings card­ed for to­day would go on. But yes­ter­day a church of­fi­cial said thee wed­dings were al­so not tak­ing place at the church’s com­pound again. He did not say whether they had been re­lo­cat­ed or post­poned un­til fur­ther no­tice.