For­mer prime min­is­ter and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty min­is­ter Stu­art Young is call­ing for a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the diplo­mat­ic in­ci­dent in­volv­ing Dr Kei­th Row­ley, who was twice de­tained ear­li­er this month while trav­el­ling on his T&T diplo­mat­ic pass­port.

Row­ley, al­so a for­mer prime min­is­ter, was tem­porar­i­ly held at An­tigua’s VC Bird In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port while tran­sit­ing to and from Montser­rat. The cir­cum­stances re­main un­clear, prompt­ing pub­lic con­cern and spec­u­la­tion.

In a state­ment post­ed on Face­book yes­ter­day morn­ing, Young de­scribed the in­ci­dent as deeply trou­bling and said it points to “the un­prece­dent­ed tar­get­ing of high of­fice hold­ers.”

“Who was it that placed Dr Row­ley on any sys­tem flag­ging him?” Young asked. “Who was it that re­quest­ed that Dr Row­ley not be per­mit­ted un­in­ter­rupt­ed pas­sage whilst us­ing his diplo­mat­ic pass­port?”

He said the mat­ter tran­scends par­ty pol­i­tics and should con­cern the en­tire gov­ern­ment.

“This is a pass­port is­sued by our coun­try and should be of in­ter­est to our Gov­ern­ment re­gard­less of who the cit­i­zen is—but in this case, it is a Prime Min­is­ter with over 45 years of pub­lic ser­vice to T&T,” Young said.

He al­so ques­tioned whether the Gov­ern­ment had of­fi­cial­ly re­quest­ed an ex­pla­na­tion from An­tigua.

“If not, why not?” he added.

An­tigua’s At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Stead­roy Ben­jamin con­firmed on Wednes­day that Row­ley was de­tained by im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cials in An­tigua, and sug­gest­ed that the is­sue may have orig­i­nat­ed in T&T.

Short­ly be­fore Young’s state­ment, Row­ley took to Face­book once more, im­ply­ing that his diplo­mat­ic breach was po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed and pos­si­bly the re­sult of in­for­mal sur­veil­lance.

“The one cer­tain fact is that a TT Diplo­mat­ic pass­port was un­der­mined for clos­er scruti­ny be­cause SOME­THING flagged it ‘on the record,’” he wrote.

He sug­gest­ed that sur­veil­lance mech­a­nisms may have been used with­out a for­mal record. “It is pos­si­ble to in­voke sur­veil­lance on per­sons through the ex­is­tence of day-to-day con­tact/re­la­tion­ships WITH­OUT ANY­THING BE­ING PUT ‘ON THE RECORD.’”

Row­ley not­ed that some might doubt his claims but in­sist­ed that cer­tain in­di­vid­u­als know what trig­gered the in­ci­dent.

Quot­ing the late Prime Min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams, he added: “This is a fair­ly ac­cu­rate de­scrip­tion of our so­ci­ety, one that I served, con­tin­ue to love and still feel im­mense­ly proud of—but as Dr Williams, the Fa­ther of the Na­tion, once was dri­ven to say: ‘We too have our raga­muffins.’ Make no mis­take, it must be raga­muf­fin time.”

On Mon­day, Row­ley first dis­closed that he had been de­tained in An­tigua af­ter im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cers scanned his diplo­mat­ic pass­port and lat­er in­formed him he was on a watch list.

That same day, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) is­sued a state­ment con­firm­ing that Row­ley was not on any In­ter­pol red no­tice or watch list. The TTPS said it had not sub­mit­ted any in­for­ma­tion to In­ter­pol that would jus­ti­fy such a list­ing and em­pha­sised that there was “no record, di­rec­tive, or pro­ce­dur­al ac­tion” to sup­port claims of lo­cal in­volve­ment.

It al­so strong­ly de­nied any po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence, de­scrib­ing it­self as an “in­de­pen­dent and apo­lit­i­cal in­sti­tu­tion.”

De­spite the TTPS clar­i­fi­ca­tion, ques­tions per­sist over the source and pur­pose of the flag that trig­gered Row­ley’s de­ten­tion—ques­tions now be­ing echoed by Young and oth­ers.