The Tribune

A MAN is dead and a one-year-old girl and two men are in hospital after a shooting at Scott Street, off Hospital Lane, police said on Thursday night.

Assistant Commissioner of Police Stephen Dean said the shooting occurred shortly after 7.30pm but had limited information about the incident.

“We just know that this group of people were outside a residence on Scott Street when people shot them and they were rushed to hospital,” ACP Dean said.

He said two men with handguns approached and fired several shots at the group standing in front of the home before fleeing the area on foot. The victims were rushed by private vehicle to hospital, where one of the men died. The infant and other two men were described as being in stable condition.

When asked how the infant was injured, ACP Dean could not say. “The baby could have been in the company of them. It could have been an indiscriminate shooting, we don’t know,” he said.

The Tribune understands the shooting took place close to where another shooting occurred earlier this month.

This latest killing pushed the country’s murder count to 30 for the year and is the 16th this month, according to The Tribune’s records.

The number of killings for the first 54 days of the year has dwarfed the number of murders police recorded in the first two months of 2016. According to police statistics, there were 18 killings in the first two months of last year - eight in January and 10 in February.

Thursday’s shooting came four days after police in New Providence launched an island-wide manhunt and public appeal for five suspects responsible for a shooting incident on Sunday night that left a man dead and a woman detained in hospital.

According to reports, shortly after 11pm Sunday, a man and a woman had just left a party and were walking on Knowles Drive off Tonique Williams-Darling Highway, when five masked men with handguns in a small white vehicle pulled up and shot them before speeding off.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene and the woman was taken to hospital, where she was last said to be in stable condition.

The increase in murders this year prompted Minister of National Security Dr Bernard Nottage to unveil additional crime fighting methods last week.

Speaking in the House of Assembly, Dr Nottage said with immediate effect “lockdowns” in certain areas, mobile police vans and an armed forces partnership among other things would be implemented.

He further admitted that people connected to “gangs, drugs and guns” are linked to the frequent killings.

Dr Nottage also said intelligence has suggested that there are connections between many violent incidents on the streets of New Providence and inmates at the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services and recently released prisoners.

He announced nearly a dozen measures to combat crime. Among these were increased foot patrols in inner cities and crime hot spots; the activation and placement of specially designed mobile police vans to serve as manned police stations in communities where crime is a challenge for police; aggressive stop and search of suspicious persons and suspicious vehicles throughout all policing divisions; periodic road checks at various intersections; purposeful lock downs of communities and crime hot spots where large teams of law enforcement officers execute search warrants, arrest warrants and search for illegal drugs, firearms and stolen vehicles.

Several other medium-term strategies are also being implemented, Dr Nottage said.