Gail Alexan­der

A to­tal of 450 Cari­com troops and po­lice of­fi­cers–plus war­ships from the UK and Cana­da–are sup­port­ing lo­cal se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ments for the Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Mar­tin Joseph has said. Joseph spoke about se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ments dur­ing yes­ter­day's week­ly Gov­ern­ment me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann's, Port-of-Spain. He said traf­fic re­stric­tions had been pub­lished re­cent­ly. These are less re­stric­tive for CHOGM than they were for the Amer­i­c­as Sum­mit in April which were strin­gent, he not­ed. Notwith­stand­ing this, se­cu­ri­ty forces had a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to en­sure CHOGM comes off with­out is­sue, Joseph said.

He said T&T's se­cu­ri­ty forces were be­ing sup­port­ed by Cari­com forces, some of which have start­ed ar­riv­ing in T&T. This in­volved a to­tal of 300 mil­i­tary per­son­nel and 150 po­lice of­fi­cers. On Wednes­day, 32 mem­bers of the Roy­al Ba­hami­an De­fence Force ar­rived and yes­ter­day 77 per­son­nel from the Ja­maican De­fence Force ar­rived al­so. Joseph said de­tails of se­cu­ri­ty plans and re­stric­tions would be re­vealed at me­dia brief­in­gs in up­com­ing days. This would in­clude how the Ad­vance Pas­sen­ger In­for­ma­tion sys­tem would be utilised for CHOGM. Joseph added that mea­sures were be­ing im­ple­ment­ed to en­sure that while CHOGM heads would be pro­tect­ed, safe­ty for cit­i­zens would not be com­pro­mised by this.