Po­lit­i­cal leader of the Pa­tri­ot­ic Front Mick­ela Pan­day has crit­i­cised Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s han­dling of ques­tions sur­round­ing re­port­ed U.S. mil­i­tary strikes in the re­gion, say­ing her re­spons­es show con­fu­sion, de­nial and a lack of aware­ness about an in­ter­na­tion­al in­ci­dent un­fold­ing close to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

In a state­ment shared on so­cial me­dia this morn­ing, Pan­day said the sit­u­a­tion has moved be­yond pol­i­tics and now rais­es con­cerns about whether the Prime Min­is­ter is mis­lead­ing the pub­lic or is sim­ply out of her depth.

She out­lined the se­quence of events, be­gin­ning with a Sep­tem­ber 2 U.S. Navy airstrike on a Venezue­lan ves­sel in the Caribbean that left eleven peo­ple dead. She said in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports lat­er re­vealed that two peo­ple sur­vived the ini­tial strike and that a sec­ond at­tack, de­scribed as a “dou­ble tap”, was al­leged­ly or­dered to kill them. She added that the Wash­ing­ton Post and the New York Times both pub­lished in­ves­ti­ga­tions, and that glob­al me­dia placed Trinidad and To­ba­go at the cen­tre of the un­fold­ing mat­ter. Ac­cord­ing to the re­lease, the White House con­firmed the sec­ond strike on De­cem­ber 1.