31 PDO detainees released on Thursday

Shane Su­perville

A to­tal of 31 peo­ple held un­der pre­ven­tive de­ten­tion or­ders (PDOs) dur­ing the State of Emer­gency (SoE) were re­leased from three prison fa­cil­i­ties on Thurs­day, ac­cord­ing to se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cials.

Sources con­firmed that 29 de­tainees were re­leased from Gold­en Grove Prison in Arou­ca, while one per­son each was re­leased from the Youth Train­ing Cen­tre (YTC) and the Women’s Prison, al­so in Arou­ca.

The re­leas­es came as rel­a­tives of peo­ple de­tained un­der the PDOs gath­ered out­side the East­ern Cor­rec­tion­al and Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­tre (ECRC) in San­ta Rosa, hop­ing their loved ones would be freed.

From as ear­ly as 9 a.m. on Thurs­day, scores of rel­a­tives wait­ed in ve­hi­cles along an ac­cess road near the fa­cil­i­ty, while heav­i­ly armed prison and po­lice of­fi­cers guard­ed near­by bar­ri­cades.

CNC3 News sought con­fir­ma­tion on whether de­tainees were be­ing re­leased at the ECRC, but a se­nior po­lice of­fi­cer de­clined to com­ment, cit­ing se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns.

A source said re­leas­es had be­gun at the Women’s Prison and Youth Train­ing Cen­tre, while on­ly a hand­ful of de­tainees had been re­leased from the ECRC by Thurs­day af­ter­noon.

As of Fri­day morn­ing, there was no in­for­ma­tion on how many de­tainees, if any, were re­leased from the ECRC.

This is a de­vel­op­ing sto­ry.