The criminal elements in Belize have been stepping up their methods of operating for awhile now. Law enforcement, it appears, is always a few steps behind, trying to catch up, or the authorities may be just plain unable to cope with the increasing sophistication of the crime problems that appear to be fuelled by the narcotics traffickers who use Belize as a transshipment point for their products of death.
On Tuesday night, March 3, another dangerous threshold was crossed when the home of a senior member of the country’s public service was attacked—sending a chilling message to the rest of Belize’s officialdom.
Comptroller of Customs, Gregory Gibson, 52, retuned to his Belama Phase 1 home, which is located at #85 Signa Yorke Street, sometime shortly after 7:30 Tuesday night. His wife and sixteen-year-old daughter were already home.
Gibson told Amandala that he was taking a shower, “when all of a sudden I heard a loud explosion from the third floor of the house. The first thing that came to my mind is that I must have left some gasoline upstairs.”
His daughter had just finished exercising on the third floor and had gone down to the second floor where her parents were, when the explosion occurred.
But it was no gasoline that Gibson had forgotten on the third floor of his home. Someone, who may have been on a stakeout of his home, realized that he had just gone into his house and hurled a deadly hand grenade on the third floor of the house.
Belize Defense Force Major David Jones has confirmed to Amandala this afternoon that it was one of the British-made L109 offensive hand grenades that landed on Gibson’s third floor.
The grenade blast gouged a deep hole in the concrete wall that is about one foot in diameter. But that is not all. There is evidence of shrapnel in a wide area of the rooftop wall, through which tiny pieces of shrapnel penetrated. A bundle of plastic chairs were thrown from against the wall a few feet. The effects of the grenade punctured their metal footing.
Jones said the day after the blast he and some police officers who were combing the area around Gibson’s house for evidence of what could have caused the explosion came across the fly-off-lever of the deadly L109 grenade. The lever was lodged in a coconut tree that is behind Gibson’s house, approximately ten yards from where the grenade landed.
During the Carnival Parade on Saturday, September 6, 2008, a similar grenade was lobbed at a crowd of Carnival spectators on Princess Margaret Drive near the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital.
But it was not until an L109 actually exploded in a yard behind the Old Fabers Road on November 14, 2008, that an investigation revealed that the British Army Training and Support Unit in Belize (BATSUB) had lost around twenty-four L109’s. That information, however, was not made public until after the November explosion.
Major Jones told this newspaper that the grenade that exploded on Gibson’s third floor rooftop apparently did not come from the lost batch. Jones said that if anyone had been on the rooftop when the grenade was thrown, that person would have been killed. The grenade has a lethal radius of around fifteen meters, or about forty-five feet.
The BDF Major said that he will follow up with the British to find out from where that grenade originated.
Just who is responsible for throwing the grenade? The grenade was thrown from behind Gibson’s house, where an empty lot is. The empty lot is accessible from off Juliet Soberanis Street. According to Oscar Rosado, Sr., a resident of Juliet Soberanis Street, the earth shook under his feet when the explosion occurred. “From where I was standing, I saw a ball of smoke coming from off Mr. Gibson’s rooftop.”
Gibson told Amandala that his neighbors observed a vehicle speeding away into the night after the explosion. It was a white car, but the make remains unknown.
Gibson said that some grenade fragments landed on two of his neighbors’ house tops.
Gregory Gibson has been at the helm of the Customs Department since 2004. In recent times, three shipments have vanished out of the Customs compound. Two of the shipments that disappeared are containers that were suspected of containing millions of dollars worth of the drug Sudo-Ephedrine. Customs have also destroyed two shipments of pseudo- ephedrine said to be worth in excess of fifty million dollars on the streets of the United States. Gibson said that another partial shipment of suspected cargo that arrived in the country by air vanished from the TACA warehouse.
Presently there are investigations going on surrounding the disappeared containers. “There is an internal investigation on with regards to the missing containers,” Comptroller Gibson revealed. There are about six or seven Customs Officers who are being investigated by the Department and the Police.
Gibson said that he does not know if the person or persons who attacked him home are local or foreigners. But the fact that the containers disappeared suggests there is a foreign dimension to the whole thing.