By Raffique Shah
January 28, 2007
The comical though heavy-handed manner in which the police handled the Inshan Ishmael issue makes one want to laugh till you cry. Here’s a man who decided to mount a crusade against the evils that bedevil the society. In the still of the night, on the eve of his planned shutdown of the country, tonnes (yeah, tonnes!) of cops swoop down on his home and drag him away from his family much the way kidnappers do. They cart him off to Police HQ, hold him for most of the day. They then charge him with publishing a pamphlet without identifying the publisher-one of the most trivial, archaic laws in our statute books!
Continue reading Sledgehammer for a sandfly
A 47-year-old Woman Police Constable attached to the Morvant Police Station, her 48-year-old husband, 20-year-old daughter and a man said to be in his ’40s were gunned down by four masked gunmen, who stormed into the Pelican Extension, Morvant home of the officer around 8.30 pm last night. 
YASIN ABU BAKR, the leader of the Jamaat Al Muslimeen, was yesterday afternoon freed of the charge of conspiracy to murder two expelled members of his organisation.
The screaming headlines of a woman beheaded by “A close family member”- always a husband, were stunning, even for Trinidad’s papers. I found myself again asking why? What can people do to prevent this? The island is really so small that a woman cannot get away from a man who wants to hunt her down. Of course he drank poison. How often in the last five years has this scenario been repeated in Central? I said to myself that I wasn’t going to write any more columns on women being killed by dotish men whom they should have left long ago. Then Ras Tyehimba wrote a piece that gave some hope. A man was talking to men about the serious issue of how they treat women. His piece did not generate half as much comment as did the pieces I wrote first on the issue of land reform in Zimbabwe, and then on the issue of “Indians” pleading for ‘rescue from discrimination’ to the Indian Vice- President. This latter piece resulted in twenty nine comments. There are thirty-two listed, but three are clarification and additional documentation from my own keyboard.
Chief Justice Satnarine Sharma has been charged and is now on $250.000 bail. The Chief Justice surrendered to the police to face charges following losing his appeal at the Privy Council. He maintains he did no wrong.