Body Of Infant Found In Latrine After Relative Said He Was Kidnapped

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad CMC – Police are investigating a case in which the body of a one-year-old boy was found in a latrine, hours after a male relative told police that he had been abducted by three men on Wednesday, Universal Children’s Day.

Police said that the 26-year-old relative, who remains under guard at a hospital here, said the body had been kidnapped after three gunmen broke through his front door and demanded he hand over a gun they said he had.

Police said the man told them he informed the gunmen that he had no knowledge of any gun but they made him slit both his wrists and swallow a cup of pitch oil.

Police said the man claimed that the gunmen then snatched Jacob Monroe from his home in Maracas Valley in St. Joseph, east of here, and fled the scene.

A search party later discovered the child’s body wrapped in a burgundy-coloured piece of cloth in an outside latrine, not far his home.

Police said they are treating the matter as a possible murder and not a kidnapping, and that the relative is being considered a prime suspect.