Ru­mours that three Chi­nese crew mem­bers on-board a ship docked at the Port of Point Lisas are dead, have been dis­pelled.

The false in­for­ma­tion stemmed from a What­sApp mes­sage that went vi­ral on Thurs­day re­lat­ing to the glob­al epi­dem­ic, the Coro­n­avirus nCov-2019.

The mes­sage read:

"Guys, just got con­fir­ma­tion that there was a ves­sel that docked yes­ter­day at Point Lisas with three dead crew mem­bers. The ves­sel orig­i­nat­ed from Chi­na and tran­shipped through Brazil...Plipde­co is say­ing noth­ing but the en­tire port is on very high alert. Three hears­es were al­so spot­ted on the port late yes­ter­day evening...The name of the ves­sel is the MTM Shang­hai cur­rent­ly at berth 1."

How­ev­er, T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) has de­bunked the mes­sage in a me­dia re­lease, say­ing it is false and caus­ing un­nec­es­sary pan­ic.

The TTPS state­ment list­ed three facts:

"There are ze­ro re­ports of dead crew mem­bers at the PT Lisas port or any oth­er port...The MTM Shang­hai is a Sin­ga­pore­an ves­sel that be­fore dock­ing in Trinidad, its ports of call were in Brazil, the USA and the UK. Its last vis­it to Asia was in mid-2019 and there were no Chi­nese na­tion­als on board the MTM Shang­hai as its crew is com­prised of Rus­sians, Ukraini­ans and Fil­ipino crew­men."

"Cit­i­zens are ad­vised to re­frain from post­ing and shar­ing mis­lead­ing in­for­ma­tion that can cause un­nec­es­sary pan­ic and anx­i­ety," the TTPS said.

Guardian Me­dia was told that the hears­es seen at the Point Lisas Port were in fact car­ry­ing the bod­ies of three Venezue­lans that were to be shipped back to their home­land in Venezuela.

The bod­ies were pre­pared and ini­tial­ly tak­en to the Port in Ce­dros, how­ev­er, there were no scan­ners at that fa­cil­i­ty to scan the bod­ies so they need­ed to be tak­en to the Point Lisas Port for scan­ning by Cus­toms and Ex­cise.

---

Sto­ry by RHON­DOR DOWLAT-ROS­TANT