Jesse Ramdeo

Near­ly two hun­dred peo­ple for the year so far have been de­tained in con­nec­tion with the theft and van­dal­ism of TSTT ca­bles across the coun­try.

The rev­e­la­tion was made by Pub­lic Util­i­ties min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les who was re­spond­ing to ques­tions about what was be­ing done to ad­dress the is­sue.

"Such in­ci­dents have in­ten­si­fied with the sig­nif­i­cant in­crease ex­pe­ri­enced in the com­mod­i­ty price of cop­per on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket re­cent­ly, I join with TSTT in de­nounc­ing those van­dals as they are dis­rup­tive to cus­tomers. It has been re­port­ed that for this year thus far 184 per­sons have been ap­pre­hend­ed and tak­en be­fore the courts for such of­fences."

Gon­za­les said as TSTT moves cus­tomers away from its cop­per net­work to the ad­vanced fi­bre net­work it has com­menced the re­moval of the cop­per plant.

He al­so main­tained that TSTT will ex­pe­dite the process to re­move over­hang­ing ca­bles fol­low­ing re­cent at­tacks.

"I'm ad­vised by TSTT that giv­en the spate and in­creased van­dal­ism that has been tak­ing place over the last cou­ple months it t=in­tends to com­plete this process with­in the next 3-4 months."