Po­lice of­fi­cers are con­tin­u­ing the search for a known sus­pect who aban­doned a car con­tain­ing over $11 mil­lion worth of mar­i­jua­na in Trinci­ty on Sat­ur­day.

The drug bust has been hailed as yet an­oth­er suc­cess by the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice in its goal to stem the il­le­gal drug trade.

Re­ports stat­ed that of­fi­cers from the Nar­cotics and Dan­ger­ous Drugs Task Force (NDTF) South, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with a Spe­cial­ist Unit of the TTPS, found ap­prox­i­mate­ly 108 kilo­grams of high-grade cannabis, val­ued at ap­prox­i­mate­ly $11.9 mil­lion, in the ve­hi­cle.

The in­tel­li­gence-led op­er­a­tion in the North Cen­tral Di­vi­sion, was co­or­di­nat­ed by Snr Supt May­nard-Wil­son, Supt McKen­zie and ASP Pitt, spear­head­ed by In­sp Gadar and Sgt Fos­te and su­per­vised by PC Per­sad.

Dur­ing the ex­er­cise, of­fi­cers re­ceived in­for­ma­tion from the Spe­cial­ist Unit around 8.30 am that a cream Nis­san Almera was re­port­ed­ly con­vey­ing firearms and nar­cotics east along the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way. As the team at­tempt­ed to in­ter­cept the sus­pect’s ve­hi­cle near the Trinci­ty in­ter­sec­tion, the dri­ver was alert­ed and breached the red light. Fol­low­ing a brief chase, the sus­pect drove on­to the Trinci­ty Mall com­pound, aban­doned the car and ran in­to the mall.

Sev­er­al of­fi­cers se­cured the ve­hi­cle while sev­er­al more went in search of the sus­pect. How­ev­er, the sus­pect elud­ed the of­fi­cers.

Mean­while, a sub­se­quent search of the ve­hi­cle led to the dis­cov­ery of five bales con­tain­ing 179 pack­ets of Colom­bian “Creepy” Cannabis, with a com­bined weight of 108.89 kilo­grams. The ve­hi­cle and nar­cotics were lat­er tak­en to the San Rafael Po­lice Sta­tion, where they were processed by Crime Scene In­ves­ti­ga­tors.

The TTPS con­tin­ues to urge cit­i­zens to re­port any in­for­ma­tion on nar­cotics or firearm traf­fick­ing to the Po­lice Ser­vice hot­line at 555, or anony­mous­ly via Crime Stop­pers at 800-TIPS (8477). - An­na-Lisa Paul