Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has ac­cused crit­ics of the Gov­ern­ment’s an­ti-crime cam­paign of at­tempt­ing to in­flame racial ten­sions and un­der­mine Trinidad and To­ba­go’s pro­tec­tive ser­vices, as the ad­min­is­tra­tion faces mount­ing crit­i­cism over its use of in­tel­li­gence, pre­ven­tive de­ten­tion or­ders and as­sis­tance from Unit­ed States se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies in a high-pro­file al­leged as­sas­si­na­tion plot in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

In a state­ment post­ed on so­cial me­dia on Mon­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­leged that peo­ple who had ben­e­fit­ed from crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty had “spread false nar­ra­tives to stoke ha­tred be­tween the two ma­jor eth­nic groups” while at­tack­ing the coun­try’s pro­tec­tive ser­vices and the Unit­ed States for sup­port­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go’s an­ti-crime ef­forts.

Her com­ments fol­lowed the pub­li­ca­tion of in­ter­cept­ed con­ver­sa­tions at­trib­uted to Sab­ga . The con­tents were al­so in an af­fi­davit, pre­vi­ous­ly re­port­ed by Guardian Me­dia, which al­so dis­closed that elec­tron­ic de­vices linked to the in­ves­ti­ga­tion had been ex­am­ined by part­ner agen­cies in the Unit­ed States as part of an on­go­ing probe in­to an al­leged plot to as­sas­si­nate the Prime Min­is­ter and mem­bers of her Gov­ern­ment.