Snr cop confident of winning war against crime

"We can win the war on crime, but police must be prepared to die for it, like what happened to PC Omah Marajah two weeks ago at Piarco."

According to reports, Llewelyn Davis, 25, of Mountain View, Maracas St Joseph, drove his car into the Tunapuna Police Station around 7.45 pm on Tuesday night. When frightened, armed officers responded, they found Davis sitting behind the steering wheel with a bullet wound in his hand and right side of his chest, and Nigel Paul, 20, of Toncabean Alley, Maracas/St Joseph, slumped over on the passenger side with a bullet wound in the head.

Both men were rushed to the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex (EWMSC) where Paul, an electrician, was pronounced dead. Davis remains hospitalised.

Reports revealed the injured Davis told police that Paul, who returned to Trinidad three weeks ago from vacationing in England, had hired him at Curepe junction earlier that day for $15 to visit a girl on Balthazar Street, Tunapuna.

While speaking to the girl on the hill, a man walked up to the car and started firing. The driver then drove down the hill to the Eastern Main Road, into the police station.

When Newsday visited the scene, residents spoke of an earlier confrontation between Paul and a man over a woman he was seeing in the area. Sources said minutes earlier, the car in which Paul was sitting was shot at on Fairley Street, Tunapuna, and in trying to get away, they drove into an ambush.

According to sources, men were hiding in the bush at Upper Balthazar Street at a place called the "Zone," when the shooting took place.

Police said there is an ongoing gang war between the Zone gang and the Straker Lane gang, who had an argument recently in which a car was set on fire. When the men saw the heavily tinted car approaching, they thought it was one of the Straker Lane gang members, so they hid and ambushed them.

When Newsday visited the area, relatives denied that Paul was in a gang or visited a girl on Balthazar Street. They also claimed he would not hire a car and had no girlfriend on that street.

Efforts to speak to Davis at the EWMSC were futile.

There have now been 130 murders in 138 days.

Visiting the scene were ASP Farrell, Sgt Forde and Cpl Emanuel. Cpl Emanuel is investigating.