Benjai lucky to be alive, should be charged (Trinidad Express)
By Alexander Bruzual
January 29, 2015
The Trinidad and Tobago Police Service Social and Welfare Association (TTPSSWA) is of the opinion soca artiste Benjai (Rodney Le Blanc) should be charged for his role in allegedly breaching a police escort along the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway on Sunday.
According to police sources, a vehicle breached a police escort which was transporting President Anthony Carmona. As a result, officers in one of the police vehicles in the escort were said to have
fired shots at the vehicle, in order to bring it to a stop. Association officials, in an interview yesterday on i95.5fm, said based on information from enquiries they made, Le Blanc was allegedly tailing the escort service from Port of Spain, and upon reaching Aranjuez, the officers shot at the tyre of the car.
According to TTPSSWA president Anand Ramesar, the officers were well within their rights to do so, and
he was of the opinion an investigation must be launched and Le Blanc should be charged.
“The association, from the onset, has been approaching this investigation with a lot of caution. And from enquiries we made with our membership on what happened that
particular day, we are sufficiently clear in our minds that the police would have acted correctly and would have also acted with restraint, actually, and we have taken the position that a full investigation should be conducted in this matter, with a view to laying criminal charges against those responsible...those who would have breached the security escort on that particular day,” Ramesar said.
General secretary Michael Seales said the persons in the car were lucky to be alive as in other countries, those persons may have been killed for their actions.
“The President of this country was being escorted at that point in time and these officers, the ones who are escorting him, are trained to shoot into the car at a chest level, in order to neutralise any targets who could potentially be a threat to the dignitary who is being escorted at that point in time,” said Seales.
“So hats off to them (the police escort), I mean, these officers did breach their training protocol, but at the same time, today, the persons who may have suffered in that regard are now alive to tell the story. In other countries, in those same circumstances, those persons would have been dead men. But it is fortunate that the officers did not take the hard-line approach to their training as it would have been a devastating blow to the soca industry.”
At the time, Le Blanc was coming from the Soca Monarch qualifying competition at the Queen’s Park Savanna in Port of Spain.
The incident was captured by a passenger in his car and uploaded to
social media where it has since gone viral.
At the police news briefing yesterday, public information officer Supt Joanne Archie indicated an investigation had been initiated on the report.