The group of peo­ple found breach­ing the Pub­lic Health Or­di­nance meant to halt the spread of the nov­el coro­n­avirus has been fined a com­bined to­tal of $8,000.

The ac­cused are: Leti­cia De­bideen, Nak­isha He­witt, Natasha Meade, Mar­tin Hunter, At­i­ba Phillip, Gi­lan­ni Ash and Ter­ric Jack.

Six of them are from Co­corite but Hunter is from St Ann’s.

A re­lease is­sued by the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) said the sev­en peo­ple ap­peared vir­tu­al­ly be­fore Mag­is­trate Sarah De Sil­va and all plead­ed guilty.

Six of them were fined $1,000 each and were giv­en sev­en days to pay the fine or will face two weeks sim­ple im­pris­on­ment. Hunter was fined $2,000 or three weeks sim­ple im­pris­on­ment.

An ini­tial re­port stat­ed that at about 4.30 pm on Wednes­day, po­lice were on mo­bile pa­trol when they were in­formed that peo­ple were bathing in the Gulf of Paria near Bay­side Tow­ers, Co­corite.

The of­fi­cers went to the lo­ca­tion, found the sus­pects on the beach, ar­rest­ed them and took them to the Four Roads Po­lice Sta­tion.

The TTPS state­ment said the sus­pects were charged in ac­cor­dance with Sec­tion 3 (1) (d) of the Pub­lic Health (2019 Nov­el Coro­n­avirus (2019-Cov) (No 14) Reg­u­la­tions 202, which states that dur­ing the spec­i­fied pe­ri­od, a per­son shall not, with­out rea­son­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, “be found at or in any beach, riv­er, stream, pond, spring, or sim­i­lar body of wa­ter, un­less the pres­ence of that per­son is es­sen­tial for the car­ry­ing out or pro­vi­sion of a ser­vice spec­i­fied.”

The max­i­mum fine for this breach is $50,000 and six months in prison. The TTPS ini­tial­ly said 10 in­di­vid­u­als were ar­rest­ed but the state­ment on­ly gave in­for­ma­tion for sev­en peo­ple.