Jensen La Vende

While po­lice have con­firmed that they have re­ceived re­ports of death threats against in­ves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Mark Bas­sant and are ac­tive­ly pur­su­ing the case, the act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Stephen Williams says the threats may have been caused by Bas­sant's own do­ing.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with i95 FM yes­ter­day Williams said he was un­aware of some of the claims Bas­sant was mak­ing in some of his re­cent re­ports, which in­clud­ed up­dates on the as­sas­si­na­tion of de­fence at­tor­ney Dana See­ta­hal, which took place on May 4, and plans to over­throw the Gov­ern­ment by a rad­i­cal re­li­gious group.

"There is a lot of state­ments and ut­ter­ances which have been very ir­re­spon­si­ble of him. Things which are in­cor­rect, which I know as a fact are in­cor­rect, based on the of­fice I hold and my ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion, are in­cor­rect, and some of it might have trig­gered threats to Mr Mark Bas­sant," Williams said.Bas­sant made the claim of threats to his life on Wednes­day dur­ing TV6's night­ly news­cast.

He said he had been tipped off by un­der­world sources that a start­ing price of $20,000 had been placed on his head as his re­ports had been "show­ing up" the crim­i­nal el­e­ments.The threat first be­came known to him on May 7, Bas­sant said dur­ing the in­ter­view, adding that po­lice of­fi­cers were al­so leak­ing in­for­ma­tion about him to the crim­i­nal un­der­world. Bas­sant has since been sent out of the coun­try by his em­ploy­ers.

Con­tact­ed for a com­ment yes­ter­day, head of news at TV6 Do­minic Kaliper­sad said: "We are aware that a re­port was made of a death threat that may have been trig­gered by news sto­ries car­ried by Mr Bas­sant."