Four days af­ter the prison ri­ot at the Ra­mand Yard of Gold­en Grove Prison in Arou­ca in­volv­ing more than 250 in­mates, the fa­cil­i­ty was again locked down yes­ter­day as the in­mates were tem­porar­i­ly trans­ferred to the near­by Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison (MSP).

Strict se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures were put in place for the trans­porta­tion of the in­mates, as prison of­fi­cers, sol­diers from the Trinidad and To­ba­go De­fence Force and of­fi­cers from the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, in­clud­ing the Guard and Emer­gency Branch (GEB) and Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team (SORT), locked down the perime­ter in and around the re­mand fa­cil­i­ty.

The Gold­en Grove Road was blocked by army and po­lice per­son­nel for sev­er­al hours as the trans­porta­tion of the pris­on­ers took place af­ter lunch in­to the evening.

On Tues­day, sev­er­al in­mates ri­ot­ed and at­tempt­ed a prison break from the south wing at Gold­en Grove. The in­mates cit­ed op­pres­sive prison con­di­tions af­ter the mag­is­trates’ court sus­pend­ed ac­tiv­i­ty for a month due to the nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19).

The un­rest, which last­ed for at least five hours, left a pris­ons su­per­in­ten­dent bad­ly wound­ed af­ter he was at­tacked by pris­on­ers and beat­en. He suf­fered a bro­ken jaw and five bro­ken teeth. A sec­ond of­fi­cer was beat­en un­con­scious while a third is still at hos­pi­tal in crit­i­cal con­di­tion.

Act­ing Pris­ons Com­mis­sion­er Den­nis Pul­chan said af­ter­wards that he was sat­is­fied at the pro­fes­sion­al­ism dis­played by all in­volved in the ex­er­cise. Pul­chan al­so said that rel­a­tives of the trans­ferred pris­on­ers will be con­tact­ed and ad­vised of their lo­ca­tion and as­sured the pris­on­ers were hu­mane­ly treat­ed dur­ing the ex­er­cise.