The Tribune

FORMER Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Thompson called on the government to interrogate illegal migrants who are smuggled into the Bahamas in order to gather enough information to break the pattern of smuggling persons into the country.

Mr Thompson, who appeared as the guest on a radio programme yesterday, said the police could expose those persons responsible for such activity by holding the migrants.

He said: “At least you should be able to find out who the captain is! We have to interrogate the people and find out how much money they paid, who they paid, when they paid, who they are coming here to, and is there someone here who was going to meet you and take care of you? All of that information we should try to get from those people when they are arrested. Don’t just take them to the Detention Centre. That kind of interrogation could take weeks.”

Urging the police to question illegal migrants “thoroughly”, Mr Thompson said the force should be looking to identify people in Haiti who are being paid money to facilitate their journey to the Bahamas.

He said that the same way that the FBI was able to find out the route of human smugglers who shipped persons from Brazil, through the Bahamas, and on to Miami, the RBPF can use good police work to break the back of illegal migration.

“They should be fingerprinted and photographed and a file kept. If they came back you can identify them when they come back. They might be coming back with a different name but you can identify them with their prints. And when you identify them they should not be going to the Detention Centre, they should be sent to prison to serve their time before they are sent back,” he said.

As for the trafficking of guns in and through the Bahamas, Mr Thompson said he would try to get the government to offer financial reward for information so that they can get better intelligence on how weapons are entering the country.

“I would want to know when they are coming in and how they are coming in. I remember, decades ago we were having a lot of bank robberies in Nassau, I was in CID. The banking community decided to put up a fund for information leading to the arrest and conviction of bank robbers. In one year we were able to clean up the bank robberies. A lot of people went to prison.

“I would even go as far as saying people like the Chamber of Commerce can put up money and offer rewards. The other thing we are not getting is, we have a gun court. When last have you saw anything in the papers about someone being charged and convicted in the gun court? I thought the gun court would have been there to expedite cases of arrest for guns. But we are getting long adjournments,” he said.