Shum­ba James, a for­mer State wit­ness and sus­pect in oth­er cas­es, has been ar­rest­ed fol­low­ing a State of Emer­gency de­ten­tion or­der is­sued by Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Fitzger­ald Hinds.

Ac­cord­ing to the de­tails of the or­der, which was pub­lished in the Gazette, the ar­rest was aimed at thwart­ing an al­leged plot to mur­der key wit­ness­es in a case against James.

ACP Wayne Mys­tar yes­ter­day con­firmed that South­ern Di­vi­sion of­fi­cers ex­e­cut­ed the or­der and had James in their cus­tody.

The le­gal no­tice pub­lished yes­ter­day stat­ed that au­thor­i­ties iden­ti­fied James as a cred­i­ble sus­pect linked to var­i­ous il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties. He is al­so ac­cused of or­ches­trat­ing a plan to tar­get and kill in­di­vid­u­als be­lieved to be as­sist­ing the po­lice in their in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to his al­leged crimes.

Up­on his cap­ture, Hinds di­rect­ed that James be de­tained at the East­ern Cor­rec­tion­al Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­tre in San­ta Rosa. The or­der was made un­der the Emer­gency Pow­ers Reg­u­la­tions 2024, specif­i­cal­ly para­graph two of the Sched­ule.

James, of St Mary’s, Moru­ga, pre­vi­ous­ly served as a wit­ness in the State’s un­suc­cess­ful pros­e­cu­tion of six po­lice of­fi­cers charged in con­nec­tion with the fa­tal shoot­ing of his girl­friend Alana Dun­can, of San Fer­nan­do, and friends, Abi­gail John­son and Ker­ron “Fin­gers” Ec­cles, both of St Mary’s Vil­lage. James pre­vi­ous­ly faced sep­a­rate charges of home in­va­sion and at­tempt­ed mur­der.

In the or­der, Hinds de­clared that he was con­vinced pre­ven­tive de­ten­tion was nec­es­sary in James’ case to safe­guard pub­lic safe­ty and or­der.

“Now, there­fore, I, the Ho­n­ourable Fitzger­ald Hinds, Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, in ex­er­cise of the pow­ers con­ferred on me, do here­by or­der that the said Shum­ba James, of 34, Si­mon Trace, St Mary Vil­lage, be de­tained,” the no­tice read.