Renu­ka Singh

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day said he will await the “find­ings of in­de­pen­dent” in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­fore say­ing any­thing more on the four divers who were sucked in­to a pipeline last Fri­day and sub­se­quent­ly died.

“I note the sor­row, the trau­ma, the loss, the emo­tions, the mal­ice and the po­lit­i­cal am­bi­tion,” Row­ley said.

“I am able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween them all.”

On Mon­day, hours af­ter Paria Fu­el an­nounced the re­cov­ery mis­sion, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said ex­perts from Shell and BP will be part of a pan­el to in­ves­ti­gate the in­ci­dent, in­clud­ing what hap­pened, what pro­to­cols were in place and what needs to be put in place.

On Mon­day night, the Prime Min­is­ter’s of­fice is­sued a state­ment say­ing that “it is with great sad­ness that we have just re­ceived con­fir­ma­tion that four cit­i­zens have lost their lives whilst on tech­ni­cal sub­sea du­ty at Paria fa­cil­i­ties in the Gulf of Paria.”

The Prime Min­is­ter gave the fam­i­lies of the lost men the com­mit­ment “that all that has to be done by Paria and its as­so­ciates in this mat­ter will be pro­fes­sion­al­ly ex­e­cut­ed start­ing with the al­ready an­nounced in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­volv­ing the best pro­fes­sion­al and tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise avail­able to the coun­try.”

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