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GUYANA CHRONICLE Thursday July 30, 2015
Peru rescues 39 ‘slave workers’ from Shining Path farm (BBC News) THE Peruvian army says it has rescued 39 people from a farm where the Shining Path rebel group kept them as slaves. Some of the captives said they had been kidnapped some 30 years ago. The defence ministry said 26 of them were children, some of whom were born in captivity. The victims said they were also forced to work in fields. Some 120 Peruvian soldiers took part in the operation. Four army helicopters airlifted the captives into
safety. The military says soldiers were led to the farm by a former captive, who lived there for many years and escaped about a month ago. ‘WORK AND PROCREATE’ “We’ve been here, like this, for 30 years,” one of the rescued women told La Republica newspaper. Some of the rescued children said they were scared of the army, after being told by the rebels that the soldiers had come
to kill them. “The aim of this operation was to rescue the people who were hostages of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) in what is called a production camp,” said Vice-Defence Minister Ivan Vega Loncharich. Production camps are farms where “the children are gathered to work in agriculture and the women are expected to procreate and give birth to new rebels,” he said. La Republica said some of the children had been kidnapped from ru-
Some of the children rescued were children of Shining Path rebels
Senior guards under scrutiny (Trinidad Guardian) PRISONERS Allan “Scanny” Martin, Hassan Atwell and Christopher Selby allegedly brokered a million-dollar deal with senior prison officers to secure their freedom from the Port-of-Spain prison last Friday. The two senior prison officers are alleged to have been directly involved in the plot that eventually sprung the three prisoners but subsequently ended in the deaths of Martin, Atwell and police officer PC Sherman Maynard. According to an intelligence source, police and prisons officials probing the case have received information that guns, ammunition and an undisclosed amount of cash were smuggled into the prison minutes before the planned escape was executed. It is believed that the
Members of the T&T Defence Force stand guard outside the Royal Jail along Frederick Street, Port-of-Spain, yesterday. Extra security measures have been implemented at the facility in the aftermath of last Friday’s jailbreak PHOTO: ABRAHAM DIAZ items were smuggled in during a special visit by a junior prison officer. The T&T Guardian also
received information that at the time of the prison break, one of the key men charged for Dana Seetahal’s, SC,
murder was about to get a visit. A third senior prison officer is also closely being monitored by security officials for his possible link to the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen. It is alleged that this prison officer may be responsible for smuggling contraband items, including arms, ammunition, money and cellphones, into the prison for prisoners connected to the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen. Speaking to the T&T Guardian Wednesday, another intelligence source said the investigating team was looking closely at seven-minute video taken from CCTV footage at the facility which actually shows the identities of some of the prison officers believed to have some sort of knowledge that the prison break was about to go down.
Police say cop’s death appears to be suicide, investigations ongoing (Jamaica Gleaner) THE Manchester police say the policeman found with a fatal gunshot wound Tuesday evening appears to have committed suicide, but investigations are still at an early stage. The cop, who was attached to the Four Paths Police Station near May Pen, Clarendon, has been identified as 33-year-old corporal
Tyrone Thompson. He was found in bed in Newport, Manchester, with a gunshot wound to the head. The policeman was reportedly found with his gun in his hand. Commanding officer for the Manchester Police Division, Superintendent Melvin Brown, says while his death appears
on the surface to be suicide, the police will await the outcome of investigations. It is understood that the corporal was found by a relative who forced his way into the policeman’s home last night. He had reportedly complained to the relative that he was under stress in a conversation about 2 o’clock
Tuesday afternoon. This is the third straight Tuesday on which a cop has died. Last week, Constable Lynden Barrett was shot dead in Denham Town, west Kingston by criminals. That was seven days after one of his colleagues, constable Crystal Thomas, was also shot dead by hoodlums.
ral communities, where parents do not report abductions for fear of reprisals. The Maoist-inspired left-wing group was largely defeated in the 1990s after waging a bloody insurgency in one of South America’s poorest nations. Almost 70,000 people died or disappeared in more than a decade of internal conflict.
But the Shining Path remains active in the main cocaine producing region of the country, where it is lead by the brothers Victor and Jorge Quispe Palomino. They have been indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking offences, along with Florindo Eleuterio Flores Hala, alias Comrade Artemio, who was arrested in 2012.