The lat­est pre­ven­tive de­ten­tion or­ders is­sued un­der the State of Emer­gency ac­cuse de­tainees of crimes rang­ing from run­ning an ex­tor­tion net­work linked to Venezuela to steal­ing in­dus­tri­al ma­te­ri­als for the scrap met­al trade, ac­cord­ing to no­tices pub­lished in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Gazette.

Among the lat­est or­ders is one for Venezue­lan na­tion­al Hec­tor Julio Ser­a­no Mar­tinez, is­sued on Ju­ly 5. Ac­cord­ing to the no­tice, au­thor­i­ties have “cred­i­bly iden­ti­fied” him as a mem­ber of an or­gan­ised transna­tion­al crim­i­nal group op­er­at­ing be­tween Trinidad and To­ba­go and Venezuela.

The or­der al­leges the group en­gages in ex­tor­tion, rob­bery and oth­er or­gan­ised crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty, us­ing lo­cal and for­eign What­sApp num­bers to threat­en mem­bers of the pub­lic and de­mand mon­ey. It fur­ther al­leges that Mar­tinez act­ed as a lo­cal con­tact re­spon­si­ble for col­lect­ing mon­ey ob­tained through the ex­tor­tion scheme and that in­tel­li­gence sug­gest­ed the group in­tend­ed to es­ca­late at­tacks tar­get­ing busi­ness­es and the wider pub­lic.