Beckles slams Govt on PDO strategy; rejects PNM drug link claims

KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­[email protected]

Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les has ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of at­tempt­ing to link the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) to drug traf­fick­ing, while ques­tion­ing why al­leged gang mem­bers are be­ing de­tained un­der Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs) in­stead of be­ing charged.

Speak­ing at an Op­po­si­tion me­dia brief­ing yes­ter­day, Beck­les stopped short of com­ment­ing di­rect­ly on claims link­ing the Hadeed fam­i­ly to the PNM, say­ing the mat­ter re­mains be­fore the courts.

Beck­les said, “I don’t know in what con­text they want to say that, but I will be very care­ful to com­ment on that. That mat­ter, as I un­der­stand it, is still be­fore the court and there­fore I do not pro­pose to com­ment on it.”

How­ev­er, Beck­les ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of try­ing to cre­ate the im­pres­sion that the Op­po­si­tion is con­nect­ed to nar­co-traf­fick­ing.

“It is not un­heard of, un­usu­al that the Prime Min­is­ter, since the Venezuela and the nar­co-traf­fick­ing is­sue, has been mak­ing all sorts of state­ments about the PNM… So, when we sat in the Par­lia­ment and the Prime Min­is­ter and the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al were mak­ing all sorts of state­ments about ‘If you don’t lis­ten and take note Tetron awaits you’ and to say ‘they are friends of the PNM’ be­cause they want to cre­ate cer­tain kinds of link­ages and im­pres­sions.

“So this is­sue of want­i­ng to link us di­rect­ly and to say the PNM is as­so­ci­at­ed and in­volved in drugs and in­volved in nar­co-traf­fick­ing, the Prime Min­is­ter needs to be very care­ful about this brush that they are paint­ing. A lot of what they are say­ing, they say it un­der the cov­er of par­lia­men­tary priv­i­lege and that is the big dif­fer­ence,” she said.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, she al­so de­fend­ed the PNM’s own­er­ship of Bal­isi­er House, say­ing the par­ty law­ful­ly pur­chased the prop­er­ty.

“As the po­lit­i­cal leader of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment, I will say very proud­ly that our par­ty has al­ways had a po­si­tion as it re­lates to Bal­isi­er House. That prop­er­ty was pur­chased. There’s a deed for that prop­er­ty.”

Turn­ing to the Gov­ern­ment’s use of PDOs, Beck­les ques­tioned why in­di­vid­u­als iden­ti­fied by po­lice as key par­tic­i­pants in gang ac­tiv­i­ty were be­ing de­tained rather than charged.

Beck­les ar­gued that if the au­thor­i­ties have suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to iden­ti­fy al­leged gang mem­bers and their ac­tiv­i­ties, crim­i­nal charges should fol­low in­stead of con­tin­ued de­ten­tion un­der the emer­gency pow­ers.

Ref­er­enc­ing po­lice re­ports which iden­ti­fied some peo­ple as key par­tic­i­pants in on­go­ing gang con­flict in­volv­ing shoot­ings and re­tal­ia­to­ry at­tacks, she added, “Why it is that they are on­ly hold­ing these peo­ple un­der PDOs. The Gov­ern­ment needs to tell us, if you have all of these ev­i­dence, why aren’t these peo­ple be­ing ar­rest­ed and charged... They’re giv­ing you the name, they’re giv­ing you the lo­ca­tion, they’re giv­ing you the ac­tiv­i­ty.”

Guardian Me­dia was un­able to get a re­sponse from Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der on the is­sue up to press time, how­ev­er, the Gov­ern­ment has pre­vi­ous­ly de­fend­ed its use of PDOs, say­ing they form part of its strat­e­gy to dis­rupt gang ac­tiv­i­ty dur­ing the SoE.

At present, hun­dreds of peo­ple re­main de­tained un­der PDOs.