BARBADOS’ crime sleuths were on the hunt last night for members of a gang responsible for the country’s most horrific ever single criminal tragedy on Friday night.
The bizarre incident, which has sent shockwaves across the nation at a time of increasing criminality, left six people dead and a two-storey business enterprise completely destroyed by fire from an incendiary device.
Three of the six dead were employees of the popular “Campus Trendz” store while the three other victims were shoppers.
They were all trapped in the building while firefighters fought valiantly to put out the raging flames started from an exploded bomb hurled into the building when two robbers attacked the business place on Tudor Street in the capital, Bridgetown.
As families, relatives and friends of the deceased -all young women, ranging between 18 and 24 years –remained traumatized, detectives of the Royal Barbados Police Force held one suspect for questioning but were in no position to offer details on this unprecedented criminal act.
Just over a fortnight ago, armed robbers, also feared to be involved with criminal gangs, attacked an outlet of ‘Chicken Galore’ and stole an undisclosed sum of money before hurling a home-made bomb that led to the destruction by fire of the business place.
According to the top police reporter of the Barbados ‘Nation’ newspapers, Tim Slinger, the police view the spreading acts of criminality, and specifically the use of incendiary devices, as “a foreign-influenced pattern and aimed primarily at business places for loot…”
Earlier last week an intruder broke into the home of Archbishop Granville Williams of the Sons of God Apostolic Spiritual Baptist Church and fired gunshots when confronted before escaping.
Police Commissioner Darwin Dottin, currently engaged in a ‘square-off” with his deputy (Bertie Hinds) over complaints made to the Police Service Commission (PSC), has vowed to beat-back the wave of criminality affecting the society.
Dottin’s sharp public warning was specifically aimed at the emerging criminal gangs, a new phenomenon for Barbados but well known in crime-plagued CARICOM states such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and, to a lesser extent Guyana.