An­na-Lisa Paul

The two men killed by po­lice dur­ing a sting op­er­a­tion in Barataria on Jan­u­ary 17 have been iden­ti­fied as Kyle Kent and Michael James.

Kent, 20, lived at Up­per Gar­rick Street, Sec­ond Cale­do­nia, while James, 27, was from Mt Hope Road, San Juan.

A 38-year-old man from Co­conut Dri­ve, Mor­vant, was the third sus­pect. Al­though de­tained and ques­tioned, he has not yet been charged.

The in­ci­dent al­leged­ly oc­curred dur­ing an ex­er­cise by of­fi­cers of the North East­ern Di­vi­sion as they worked to ap­pre­hend sus­pects that were re­port­ed­ly us­ing so­cial me­dia sites to lure un­sus­pect­ing vic­tims pur­chas­ing ve­hi­cles to var­i­ous lo­ca­tions and rob them.

The mid­day shoot-out oc­curred be­tween Tenth Street and Eleventh Street, along Tenth Av­enue, Barataria.

The sting op­er­a­tion took ef­fect af­ter more than 20 re­ports of rob­beries with­in the last three months, where all the vic­tims re­port­ed­ly made trans­ac­tions on­line via Face­book Mar­ket­place.

Po­lice be­lieve the ma­jor­i­ty of in­ci­dents cen­tred around ad­ver­tise­ments for ve­hi­cle sales which al­leged­ly saw the sus­pects pos­ing as sell­ers, fol­low­ing which they would rob the in­tend­ed buy­ers of cash when they ar­rived at the agreed lo­ca­tion.