The new­ly formed An­ti-Ex­tor­tion Unit is to­day tak­ing a Ch­agua­nas man be­fore a Mas­ter of the High Court, to an­swer to 22 charges, in­clud­ing nine counts of De­mand­ing Mon­ey by Men­ace, to­talling $153,000. 

In a state­ment, the TTPS said Varindranath Maraj, 37, was al­so charged with one count of kid­nap­ping, one count of com­mon as­sault, one count of pos­ses­sion of firearm, one count of pos­ses­sion of am­mu­ni­tion, one count of pos­ses­sion of firearm to en­dan­ger life, one count of pos­ses­sion of am­mu­ni­tion to en­dan­ger life and sev­en counts of rob­bery amount­ing to $73,000  by of­fi­cers of the An­ti-Ex­tor­tion Unit, on Sun­day 3rd No­vem­ber, 2024.

A male vic­tim re­port­ed to po­lice that dur­ing the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 2024 to Oc­to­ber 2024, a man known to him de­mand­ed sev­er­al sums of mon­ey from him at dif­fer­ent times. 

He al­leged that on one oc­ca­sion the sus­pect kid­napped him at gun­point. 

A re­port was made to the po­lice and an in­ves­ti­ga­tion launched, spear­head­ed by ACP ‘Ad­min­is­tra­tion’, Smith and su­per­vised by Sgt. Bac­chus and Cpl Phillip, both of the An­ti-Ex­tor­tion Unit. One male sus­pect was ar­rest­ed in con­nec­tion with the in­ci­dent on Tues­day 29th Oc­to­ber, 2024. Maraj was charged with the of­fences by Cpl Baksh, al­so of the An­ti-Ex­tor­tion Unit.