The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) has seized ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 kilo­grams of cannabis dur­ing a rou­tine stop and search op­er­a­tion along the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way.

Around 10:15 pm on Mon­day, of­fi­cers at­tached to the High­way Pa­trol Task Force con­duct­ed a rov­ing Stop and Search op­er­a­tion in the La Hor­quet­ta dis­trict. While on pa­trol, of­fi­cers re­ceived in­tel­li­gence re­gard­ing a gold-coloured Nis­san Ti­i­da, sus­pect­ed to be trans­port­ing firearms. Of­fi­cers ob­served the ve­hi­cle pro­ceed­ing west along the high­way and ini­ti­at­ed a traf­fic stop.

Up­on ap­proach­ing the ve­hi­cle, of­fi­cers ob­served sev­er­al large rec­tan­gu­lar plas­tic pack­ages and two large cro­cus bags con­tain­ing mul­ti­ple small­er brown rec­tan­gu­lar pack­ets in the ve­hi­cle. When ex­am­ined, the of­fi­cers dis­cov­ered that the pack­ages con­tained cannabis. The dri­ver, who was the sole oc­cu­pant of the ve­hi­cle, was im­me­di­ate­ly in­formed of the of­fence of pos­ses­sion of cannabis for the pur­pose of traf­fick­ing and was ar­rest­ed.

The sus­pect and the seized items were tak­en to the Spe­cial In­ves­ti­ga­tions Unit (SIU), where the nar­cotics were fur­ther ex­am­ined and weighed. The seizure amount­ed to 99 kilo­grams of Creepy Colom­bian cannabis, with a street val­ue of $10,864,953.

Ac­cord­ing to Snr Supt, High­way Pa­trol Branch, Garvin Si­mon, "Road stop and search ex­er­cis­es are a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of crime-fight­ing ef­forts, al­low­ing law en­force­ment to in­ter­cept il­le­gal drugs, firearms, and want­ed per­sons be­fore they can cause harm. These op­er­a­tions are es­pe­cial­ly vi­tal dur­ing the on­go­ing State of Emer­gency, as they en­hance pub­lic safe­ty by re­strict­ing and pre­vent­ing crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties."