MISSING FISHERMAN FEARED DEAD

A MASSIVE search and rescue operation, involving the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard, police, the National Security Services helicopter and villagers was underway yesterday for Moruga fisherman Victor Wilbert Alexander, 52, who is missing at sea and feared dead. Alexander and three other Moruga fishermen were abducted by armed Spanish-speaking pirates on Tuesday. While the three fishermen who escaped were reunited with their relieved relatives, Alexander’s wife Louise Dover cut a forlorn picture as she sat near the coastline and waited on news of her husband, also called “Salaam.”

“All I want is to see my husband come home alive. I am trying to wait patiently while I keep praying and keeping my hopes high,” Dover said, as tears welled up in her eyes. Police sources told Newsday they believed the pirates might be Venezuelan criminals because they spoke Spanish. Alexander was abducted at gunpoint by four armed and masked pirates while fishing in the seas off Moruga. The other fishermen, who were in another boat, were also attacked by the pirates and later ordered to jump into a river some miles from the Moruga Village. They swam to shore and trekked three miles through the forests. “It was not easy at all,” Desmond “Grout” Raphael told Newsday of the ordeal he and his two colleagues faced at the hands of the pirates.

According to the fishermen, Raphael, Nicholas Sookhan and Kenrick Harripersad, all of Gran Chemin, Moruga went out to sea to fish in their pirogue “Wild Geese” at around 11.30 am on Tuesday, when another pirogue with the pirates, painted in blue and red and with no identity markings, approached them. Two of the masked men jumped into the fishermen’s boat and, in broken English mixed with Spanish phrases, ordered them to lie face down in the boat, where their hands were tied behind their backs. “We were then taken God knows where, but at some point, I felt our boat collide with another,” Raphael, 46, said. “To me, I know for sure the boat we bumped into had to be the one named ‘Ria’ in which Alexander was, because I know that at that time there were only two boats out in that part of the sea, mine and Alexander’s,” Raphael added. “I really don’t know what took place after that, but I had a gut feeling that something was definitely wrong and Alexander was in danger,” Raphael continued.

Raphael said the two pirates took them on a hour-long journey until they reached the mouth of a river still on the Trinidad mainland, but which flowed and drained into the coast of neighbouring Venezuela. “The men kept on sailing the boat about two miles up the river before telling us to jump out. When we jumped, they sped off in our pirogue, which was later found drifting down the river with the engine missing,” Raphael said. He added that after being left in the river by the pirates, he and the other men swam to shore and trekked three miles into the forest before being rescued by fellow fishermen who had mounted a search. Police were alerted and officers took statements from the three fishermen. The officers subsequently called in the Coast Guard for assistance in searching for Alexander. When Newsday visited the sleepy fishing village yesterday, the National Security Services helicopter hovered above as aerial and sea searches for Alexander continued. However, all that was found was Alexander’s bullet-riddled icebox which he used to store his catch. Based on the pattern of the holes, police believe the pirates shot the icebox with a shotgun. The search for the missing man started from 5 am yesterday and continued throughout the day. Alexander’s worried wife Louise Dover, of La Lune Village, sat in a hammock at the Moruga fishing Depot with a dazed look on her face.

Another relative told Newsday Alexander always said that once pirates attacked him he would fight to the very end and, if he were to be killed, the pirates would go with him. Sgt Bill of Moruga Police Station and Lieutenant Polo of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard are continuing investigations. On Saturday March 20, fisherman Rupert Bissoon, 55, a father of one, drowned after being forced at gunpoint by Spanish-speaking pirates to jump into the sea. Bissoon, his relative Deodath Bissoon, 17, and Denver Beharry, 28, were ordered to jump into the sea. The pirates threw a lifejacket and a pan into the sea before speeding off in the local fishermen’s pirogue and their (the pirates) vessel. Bissoon’s body was found in the seas off Venezuela by an indigenous tribe living on the Venezuelan coast. Local fishermen have been pleading with respective governments for years to beef up security and increase Coast Guard patrols to prevent attacks from pirates and drug smugglers.