The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

DURING a House of Assembly session yesterday, Long Island MP Loretta Butler-Turner read parts of a chilling death threat letter anonymously sent to her and suggested that previous reports to police about threats were not taken seriously.

St Anne’s MP Hubert Chipman, who said he also was threatened, picked up the letters from the Free National Movement’s head office recently.

“Resign now or we will stick you in your spine with an icepick, then blow your head off…,” the letter said, according to Mrs Butler-Turner.

She said it was the fifth such death threat she has received in the last three years.

Mrs Butler-Turner said: “This is a very serious thing, maybe some people think it’s frivolous; some may think it’s a joke.

“The last three of these I have received were delivered to this Parliament and I got it out of my inbox. This was stamped and delivered to our party’s headquarters. I don’t know what I should do at this point because in the past they have been turned over to the police and there has really been no movement on this. But I do take this seriously because people have got to understand that what I do here is a service to the country and if they want me to resign I would do that; they don’t have to stick me in my spine with an icepick and blow my head off. I will be led by the minister of national security in that regard.”

Mrs Butler-Turner gained strong support from Marco City MP Greg Moss who rose on a point of privilege to urge officials to address the matter more forcefully.

“I think for us to just gloss over that as quickly as that sends the wrong message to the public,” he said. “I think it’s incumbent upon all of us here to take a stand and say to the nation and to the persons who presumably support someone in this place who they feel is challenged by the honourable member for Long Island and on whose behalf they would presume to intimidate the honourable member for Long Island, this is not something funny or something casual that we could gloss over. I think we all should have a guttural reaction to this that this is offensive, this is criminal, this is not what we expect of our supporters and that we denounce this in the strongest possible terms and that we call on all of our supporters to act like right thinking, honourable citizens of this country and leave political debates to us and not to involve themselves.

“I think if we do not take that kind of response to something like this we are tacitly encouraging this. We do not want some idiot out there, some mentally disturbed person out there to believe that they are doing what we want them to do because of our silence in sitting down when a letter as reprehensible as that is read in this House. Something more has to be said.”

National Security Minister Dr Bernard Nottage then stood and said police must investigate the mater before parliamentarians could speak more to it. He said the motives of those who made the threats are unclear.

Mr Moss, however, was not satisfied with this response, later telling The Tribune: “For someone to threaten the life of a member of Parliament, the life of anyone, particularly while we are sitting in the House, all of us should’ve condemned that in the strongest terms. And the fact that even after my invitation to the government to condemn that, that they didn’t see fit to condemn that is very troubling. We live in a country where the murder rate is equivalent to a war zone in other countries. We have to take every affront to democracy seriously and we have to take death threats seriously.”

For his part, Deputy Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis disagreed with the notion that parliamentarians are not taking the threats seriously.

“Many of us get them often,” he told The Tribune. “Not all of us make it known. So police are investigating it. We do not condone it and nor do we support it. It’s something that is foreign to our system, and we don’t wish it to become a part of our political system.”

Mr Davis said he does not believe the issue has risen to the point where greater security for parliamentarians is necessary.

In June 2014, Mrs Butler-Turner told reporters she had received death threats. At the time, she said she turned the matter over to police.

Darron Cash, who was Free National Movement chairman at the time, also revealed last year that other FNM members had received death threats.