Gail Alexan­der

Free at last.

The five T&T men who were de­tained in Venezuela since 2014 are be­ing re­leased and sent home af­ter serv­ing time, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon con­firmed yes­ter­day.

"Jus­tice has been done. They are T&T na­tion­als and they will re­turn home," he added.

The five–Do­minic Piti­lal, Wade Charles, Asim Luq­man, An­dre Bat­ters­by and Leslie Dais­ley–were de­tained in Venezuela since March 2014 on ter­ror­ism ac­tiv­i­ty charges.

They had gone to Cara­cas al­leged­ly to seek visas for Ha­jj. A T&T group which had like­wise gone to seek visas for a pil­grim­age were al­so de­tained. Un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Cap­tain Richard Kelshall and oth­er of­fi­cials of the then PP ad­min­stra­tion, that group–in­clud­ing sev­er­al imams–were re­leased soon af­ter and they re­turned home.

How­ev­er, the men were de­tained and tak­en to court sub­se­quent­ly to face ter­ror­ism charges.

Fam­i­ly, friends, and le­gal rep­re­sen­ta­tives such as at­tor­ney Nafeesa Mo­hammed (for­mer deputy PNM leader) who said the men were in­no­cent, have been lob­by­ing ever since for their re­lease.

Piti­lal's wife and son wrote let­ters to the Prime Min­is­ter ap­peal­ing for as­sis­tance in the last five months.

Dur­ing a May meet­ing in Port-of-Spain be­tween Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro, Gov­ern­ment took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ask for the mat­ter re­gard­ing the men to be ex­pe­dit­ed. Short­ly af­ter, the charges were changed to in­ten­tion to com­mit es­pi­onage and to com­mit a crim­i­nal act.

The men con­tin­ued ap­pear­ing in court on these mat­ters.

But rel­a­tives said they were re­luc­tant to plead guilty since they did not want such a con­vic­tion on their record as this would keep them un­der fu­ture scruti­ny and pre­vent them from trav­el­ling. As­so­ciates of the men in En­ter­prise again called for their re­lease re­cent­ly.

Three weeks ago, gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials learned the mat­ter was close to con­clu­sion. The mat­ter was heard in a Venezue­lan court be­tween Thurs­day and Fri­day with T&T Cara­cas Em­bassy se­nior of­fi­cials present.

Dil­lion via state­ment said the fi­nal hear­ing end­ed with a ver­dict and sen­tenc­ing at 1.30 am yes­ter­day.

"The judge passed a guilty ver­dict and a sen­tence of two years, six months and 25 days was giv­en."

Dil­lon said that was equiv­a­lent to the length of time they had been de­tained.

"The judge ruled that they have al­ready served time and are now free. As such they will now be processed and de­port­ed to Pi­ar­co at the ear­li­est op­por­tu­ni­ty," he added.

Amid much ju­bi­la­tion by fam­i­lies, friends, and at­tor­ney Mo­hammed yes­ter­day, Dil­lon made it clear Gov­ern­ment could not have in­ter­fered in the on­go­ing ju­di­cial process of an­oth­er coun­try.

A sim­i­lar po­si­tion had been stat­ed by For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Den­nis Moses last Tues­day when the Sun­day Guardian con­tact­ed him on the Venezue­lan mat­ter and two oth­er sim­i­lar is­sues.

Moses said he had had talks while at a re­cent UN con­fer­ence with the Turk­ish for­eign min­is­ter and Sau­di Ara­bi­an of­fi­cials re­gard­ing T&T na­tion­als de­tained in both coun­tries. He de­clined to di­vulge de­tails.

Is­lam­ic stud­ies stu­dent Tariq Shamoon Mo­hammed has been de­tained in Sau­di Ara­bia since Au­gust 2015.

Mo­hammed, who had been study­ing there for sev­er­al years, had re­turned home for a vis­it with his fam­i­ly, but was de­tained by Sau­di au­thor­i­ties on his re­turn there. His fam­i­ly in T&T–in­clud­ing Mo­hammed–has ap­pealed for a spe­cial am­bas­sador to deal with the is­sue as was done in pre­vi­ous mat­ters re­gard­ing T&T na­tion­als.

Al­so, Gov­ern­ment is await­ing word on nine peo­ple car­ry­ing T&T pass­ports who were de­tained by Turk­ish au­thor­i­ties in Ju­ly in com­pa­ny with a Syr­i­an na­tion­al re­port­ed to have been tak­ing them to join Isis.

The nine, in­clud­ing men, women and a child, are at a Turk­ish de­ten­tion cen­tre.