Gail Alexan­der

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley got to­geth­er yes­ter­day with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Aus­tralia, Cana­da, Unit­ed States and the Unit­ed King­dom to dis­cuss T&T’s man­age­ment of its re­cent na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty “chal­lenges.”

A state­ment from the PM’s of­fice said T&T’s suc­cess­ful man­age­ment of its re­cent “na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty chal­lenges” was the cen­tre­piece of the meet­ing at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, St Clair.

The meet­ing ap­peared to be a post-mortem of the re­cent sit­u­a­tion in­volv­ing po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to a plot to dis­rupt Car­ni­val 2018. Po­lice an­nounced on Feb­ru­ary 8 that they had un­earthed cred­i­ble in­for­ma­tion on the plot and 15 peo­ple were de­tained for al­most six days dur­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Row­ley lat­er said it was no joke and he’d hint­ed the threat in­volved dis­rup­tion of the Car­ni­val pa­rades.

Of the 15 peo­ple de­tained all but two — a cou­ple charged with firearm pos­ses­sion — were re­leased af­ter Car­ni­val. The cou­ple is to reap­pear in court in March.

Fol­low­ing the Car­ni­val, Row­ley had said the po­lice ex­er­cise to ap­pre­hend peo­ple was done by lo­cal agen­cies, but not­ed in­for­ma­tion-shar­ing al­so takes place with T&T’s part­ners. In the re­cent threat is­sues, he’d said he was eter­nal­ly grate­ful to T&T’s in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners. Last Fri­day in Par­lia­ment, the PM al­so con­firmed there is some­thing that can be con­sid­ered an Is­lam­ic State (ISIS) cell or satel­lite in T&T. How­ev­er, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi sub­se­quent­ly said the me­dia may have mis­quot­ed the PM on this, as he (Row­ley) nev­er specif­i­cal­ly con­firmed any ISIS cell here.

On yes­ter­day’s meet­ing with for­eign rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the OPM said Row­ley en­gaged in high-lev­el se­cu­ri­ty talks with British High Com­mis­sion­er Tim Stew, Aus­tralian High Com­mis­sion­er John Pil­beam, Cana­di­an High Com­mis­sion­er Car­la Hogan Rufelds and Unit­ed States Chargé d’Af­faires John McIn­tyre.

“Dur­ing dis­cus­sions our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners pledged to con­tin­ue work­ing with lo­cal law en­force­ment to pro­vide the lev­el of se­cu­ri­ty need­ed for the cit­i­zens of T&T, as well as all oth­er per­sons re­sid­ing here,” the state­ment added.

The OPM state­ment said OPM Min­is­ter Stu­art Young was al­so in­volved in the dis­cus­sions. There was no men­tion of whether Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon or Al-Rawi were present or in­volved.

The T&T Guardian’s re­cent queries to the US em­bassy on the US’s views on Row­ley’s “Isis cell” rev­e­la­tion, and whether the em­bassy here in T&T had re­al­ly been a tar­get in the Car­ni­val dis­rup­tion threat, as was be­ing al­leged dur­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tions, have gone unan­swered.