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… Raid on drug kingpin “Dudus” Coke hideout
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) – Jamaica’s security forces clashed for a second day with masked gunmen allied with an alleged drug kingpin facing extradition to the U.S. as fighting spread yesterday to more volatile slums around the capital.
Police and soldiers came under sustained heavy fire in the West Kingston stronghold of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who has been indicted in the U.S. on drug and arms trafficking charges. Military helicopters with mounted guns buzzed above the impoverished area between plumes of black smoke.
Alleged drug gang leader Christopher
A series of explosions boomed across West Kingston while hundreds of security agents assaulted Coke’s barricaded base of Tivoli Gardens in a coordinated operation against drug gangsters whose arsenals rival police firepower.
Exact details were not known about casualties. Authorities said two officers had been killed and at least six wounded since Sunday, and at least one Jamaican soldier was shot dead during yesterday’s fighting at Tivoli Gardens, the Caribbean island’s first housing project.
Clashes broke out Sunday six days after Prime Minister Bruce Golding dropped his opposition to extraditing Coke, who has ties to the governing party. Golding had stalled the case for nine months claiming the U.S. indictment relied on illegal wiretap evidence, but he caved in to a growing public outcry over his stand.
After the reversal, Coke’s supporters began barricading streets and preparing for battle.
West Kingston, which includes the Trenchtown slum where reggae superstar Bob Marley was raised, is the epicenter of the violence. But yesterday, security forces also came under fire in areas outside that patchwork of gritty slums in the capital on Jamaica’s southeastern coast, far from the virtually crime-free tourist resorts on the north shore.
Gunmen shot at police while trying to erect barricades in a poor section of St. Catherine parish, which is just outside the two parishes where the government on Sunday implemented a month-long state of emergency.
A police station in an outlying area of Kingston parish also was showered with bullets by a roving band of gunmen with high-powered rifles.
Security Minister Dwight Nelson said “police are on top of the situation,” but gunfire was reported in several poor communities and brazen gunmen even shot up Kingston’s central police station.
The drug trade is deeply entrenched in Jamaica, which is the largest producer of marijuana in the region and where gangs have become powerful organised crime networks involved in international gun smuggling. It fuels one of the world’s highest murder rates; the island of 2.8 million people had about 1,660 homicides in 2009.
Police Commissioner Owen Ellington said “scores of criminals” from drug gangs across the Caribbean island had joined the fighting in the Kingston area, where the fear of gun violence has driven many to live behind gated walls with keypad entry systems and 24-hour security.
In a sun-splashed island known more for reggae music and all-inclusive resorts, the violence erupted Sunday afternoon after nearly a week of rising tensions over the possible extradition of Coke to the United States, where he faces a possible sentence of life in prison.
Coke is described as one of the world’s most dangerous drug lords by the U.S. Justice Department.
Civil aviation officials said some flights to Kingston were diverted yesterday to the north coast tourist mecca of Montego Bay and a few flights were canceled altogether. U.S. officials have warned that access roads to the airport could be blocked by unrest.
The U.S. State Department said yesterday it was “the responsibility of the Jamaican government to locate and arrest Mr. Coke.” A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman denied widespread rumours that U.S. officials were meeting with Coke’s lawyers.
Coke’s lead attorney, Don Foote, told reporters his legal team had planned to have talks with U.S. officials at the embassy but the meeting was canceled.
Foote refused to say whether Coke was hunkered down in the barricaded Tivoli Gardens slum or was somewhere else in the country.
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