Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves has praised the doctors and other medical personnel at the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital (MCMH) for the amazing job they did in urgently and diligently rendering treatment to the eight persons who sustained injuries in the shooting incident in Diamond on Saturday night.
Speaking today on WEFM’s Morning Program, Prime Minister Gonsalves said he visited the victims yesterday at the hospital.
“The hospital mobilized, the surgeons came out, other supporting doctors, the anesetheologist, the nurses, everybody just mobilized from Accident and Emergency right through up to the theatre, to the ICU (Intensive Care Unit).”
“And when I went to the hospital on Sunday morning early just about 7:30am I saw two of the persons who were shot they were in Accident and Emergency. They were there recovering, then two were already on the Male Surgical Ward, I saw them, and two were in ICU,” Dr. Gonsalves said.
The Prime Minister, who returned this morning to the hospital to visit the shooting victims, said that one of the two persons who were in the ICU is now in the Male Surgical Ward.
He explained that one of the persons injured in the shooting incident has lost a kidney and a spleen, and was fighting for his life, but the doctors were doing their best to treat that patient.
Dr. Gonsalves said he is particularly concerned about this shooting incident since innocent bystanders were injured. He said the police are doing their best to investigate this incident.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gonsalves said there is an emerging pattern that there are about four sets of associational groupings of persons connected to criminal violence being committed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
“An emerging pattern is now there that they’re really broadly speaking four sets of associational groupings of persons connected to criminal violence… Two of them may have core members and others they more fluid.”
One group is in East St. George, and two groups, probably three groups are what you may call the Kingstown conurbation and one in South Leeward. So there may be four or five,” the Prime Minister explained.
According to Dr. Gonsalves, “one of the areas of danger is that there is evidence that they (the criminals) would import from time to time criminals from other places particularly Trinidad.”
He said “I know last week for instance the police had to deport someone from Trinidad who had a rap sheet and who had some warrants against him.”
The Prime Minister said the police are currently working diligently in relation to this matter and are doing searches in homes in certain areas and may have to move with “overwhelming force.”
He said that in addition to the police doing their work in the normal way, citizens need to be assured that the police have a handle on addressing the crime situation here and reiterated that citizen security is a high priority for him as well as the government and the police.
