Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A dis­mem­bered body was found in the wa­ters off Ch­aguara­mas by Drag­on Boat ath­letes train­ing there yes­ter­day.

Drag­on Boats of the Caribbean team mem­bers train­ing at Williams Bay made the dis­cov­ery around 8 am.

One of the men who made the dis­cov­ery spoke to Guardian Me­dia on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.

The boater said they were tak­ing a route to­ward Al­coa and then turn­ing around to head to­ward Pier 1, when they no­ticed an ob­ject float­ing in the wa­ter.

“We start­ed to smell a strong smell and then one of my pad­dlers no­ticed some­thing float­ing in the wa­ter. So, one per­son men­tioned it’s prob­a­bly some pig or rot­ted meat or cow or beef or some­thing and then some­one said but no, look that’s a heel and then we no­tice the toes and then we no­ticed that’s a whole foot sec­tion,” he said.

He said they de­cid­ed to im­me­di­ate­ly leave the site and head back to shore to alert the Drag­on Boat Fed­er­a­tion’s pres­i­dent and the po­lice.

“Up­on try­ing to pad­dle back to shore, we no­ticed the tor­so and one side of an arm and hand in the wa­ter,” he said.

The drag­on boater said his team was trau­ma­tised by what they ex­pe­ri­enced.

“A num­ber of us were shak­en, ac­tu­al­ly trem­bling. I, my­self—death is not some­thing new to me, I’ve seen death be­fore—but at the same time, you can’t get ac­cus­tomed to it...I had to take a sit. I had to sit down and just col­lect my­self a lit­tle bit,” he said.

He ex­pressed deep con­cern over the state of af­fairs sur­round­ing mur­ders in the coun­try. He said there were nu­mer­ous peo­ple un­know­ing­ly bathing in close prox­im­i­ty to the re­mains.

Mean­while, Drag­on Boat Fed­er­a­tion pres­i­dent Kei­th Dalip said, for­tu­nate­ly, it was the adult team who made the dis­cov­ery and not some of the youth teams who were al­so present yes­ter­day.

“Some of our ju­niors were about to head out on the wa­ter and we sim­ply told them to stay on the shore be­cause it would have been very trau­mat­ic for them to ex­pe­ri­ence some­thing like that on the wa­ter,” he said.

Dalip said they were prac­tis­ing for an up­com­ing com­pe­ti­tion.

West­ern Di­vi­sion po­lice of­fi­cials told Guardian Me­dia they be­lieve the dis­mem­bered body was dis­posed of in garbage bags close to the wa­ter be­fore high tide pulled it in­to the sea.

Mem­bers of the T&T Coast Guard re­trieved the body parts but po­lice combed the area for sev­er­al hours there­after search­ing for the miss­ing body parts. Po­lice be­lieve the de­ceased is a male but had not been able to iden­ti­fy him up to last evening.

This was the sec­ond time in re­cent weeks a dis­mem­bered body had been dis­cov­ered.

On Sep­tem­ber 22, a burnt and de­com­pos­ing dis­mem­bered body was found in mul­ti­ple garbage bags a few hun­dred me­tres from Bushe Street in Curepe. The body was in such an ad­vanced state of de­com­po­si­tion they were not able to dis­cern the per­son’s gen­der or eth­nic­i­ty.