Canadian Mountie coming to help TCI catch smugglers 

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff Writer 

 #TurksandCaicos, March 23, 2023 – “This is not rocket science, it’s tried and tested, and it’s all about illuminating a network of criminals cooperating together and running what is a ‘business’,” is what Governor Nigel Dakin told our news team regarding the reveal that an investigator from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will soon join a team of international law enforcement agents, trying to uncover the criminal masterminds behind human trafficking in and through The Turks and Caicos.  

Dakin had disclosed on Instagram that after every illegal landing, an intelligence team now arrives from the United States to work with local law enforcement on understating the complex web of smuggling. Someone is facilitating human trafficking in the country, and this task force along with local police is created to take them down. 

We reached out to learn more about the international force.  

“We are very good at interdictions of the large sloops. But doing this on its own is not enough— those that facilitate and support this trade, across the region and in TCI, continue to do business,” the Governor acknowledged, reiterating that “we needed to be making arrests at the top. To do that though, the criminals have to be found.” 

The team is working on extracting intelligence from those already arrested to find their bosses and put them behind bars. 

“To do that, we need international help and given the US is the favored destination of those who are leaving Haiti, the USA are more than prepared to help us go after the network of facilitators that are based here and help us understand them in terms of the damage they do to us here as well as the links they have across the region,” he said.  

A glaring example of the cross-border connections point to the shocking interception which led to the capture of internationally wanted smuggler, Canadian Sri Chelliah.  He was held in the TCI in 2019, caught red-handed trying to smuggle in 149 Sri Lankans.  Wanted in both Canada and the US, he was eventually extradited to America and is serving a 32-month prison sentence.  

Dakin believes the chance of success for this initiative, an international partnership to fight the other nefarious international partnerships, is extremely high.   

It comes as the UN, this month, warned that Haiti is facing unprecedented humanitarian crises with copious amounts of guns flowing through the country. It indicated that there has been a massive increase in high powered weapons over 2021 and 2022 to Haiti, from the US. The possibility of them making their way into the rest of the region is very high.  

The Governor reminded that the TCI has been investing heavily, and building secure intelligence structures which he appears convinced will break, the decades old trend of trafficking people and contraband through these islands.