TTPS: Body of 23-year-old kidnap victim, Andrea Bharatt, found 


The following press statement on kidnap victim Andrea Bharatt was released by the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS):

The search for kidnapped victim, Andrea Bharatt, ended this afternoon after her body was found down a precipice along the Heights of Aripo.

Photo: Andrea Bharatt, 23, went missing on 29 January 2021. Her body was found in the Heights of Aripo on 4 February 2021.

According to reports, around 12.20pm today, a motorist was driving his vehicle along the Heights of Aripo Road when he looked down a precipice and saw a decomposed body. He contacted the police who responded immediately and found the body in an advanced state of decomposition. 

Based on the clothing on the body, relatives have confirmed that it is Andrea Bharatt, 23—a clerk who was last attached to the Arima Magistrates’ Court. Ms Bharatt boarded a taxi in Arima on 29 January 2021, and has not been seen since.

Several units within the TTPS, the Defence Force, hunters and members of the public have been searching for Ms Bharatt for the past seven days. 

Several persons of interest are in police custody. Investigations are continuing.

More from Wired868
Daly Bread: Practiced detachment from the killings

Last week’s column was forced to return to what I assert is the government’s unwillingness to take any responsibility for Read more

Noble: Unending pain and suffering—save grieving communities from Hinds’ arrogance

“The area is dominated by gangs. Thus far, the police have had only limited success in eradicating the gangs. “It Read more

Daly Bread: Government extends blame game while crime rampages on

For some weeks this column had been focused on the good, the bad and the ugly of Carnival and its Read more

Noble: Is Griffith positioning himself as T&T’s J Edgar Hoover? Or Donald Trump?

“A lawless, indisciplined and corrupt nation cannot fight crime.” Pastor Clive Dottin, The People’s Roundtable, January 2024. At The People’s Read more

Noble: The problem with Dr Paul Richards’ grilling of Police Commissioner

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera, a Czech and French novelist, Read more

Dear Editor: Senator Richards must prove allegations against Alexander, or apologise!

“[…] Dr Paul Richards is not only an independent senator, but also a very experienced journalist. He ought to know Read more

About Letters to the Editor

Want to share your thoughts with Wired868? Email us at editor@wired868.com. Please keep your letter between 300 to 600 words and be sure to read it over first for typos and punctuation. We don't publish anonymously unless there is a good reason, such as an obvious threat of harassment or job loss.

Check Also

Daly Bread: Practiced detachment from the killings

Last week’s column was forced to return to what I assert is the government’s unwillingness …

8 comments

  1. thehandbehindthecurtain

    This is the murder that should bring back capital punishment in TT. It is not about more or less gruesome, it is just the whole thing of it, between 5000-10000 people murdered since the year 2000. This woman had a good job, was making something out of herself and then literal monsters snatched her up from a ”taxi” and destroyed her. A group of people came together to kill her, use her bank card to thief her money, made threats to her father, and almost certainly they raped her and then murdered her. Sickos in every sense. If the people who did this do not face capital punishment then who. Now some critic will say ”well who do you want to execute without convictions”, we may have difficulty prosecuting murderers that is why we must not simply execute murderers, we should target serious crime offenders with capital punishment long before they can graduate to murder. You rape=capital punishment, you traffic weapons=capital punishment, you join a gang=capital punishment. Let them die so we who are law abiding get to live. If you want to defeat crime you must be willing to do what must be done.
    Some criminals start as murderers having been handed a gun by a gang to prove themselves but others spend years escalating from theft, to sex crimes, to fraud to murder. Do not let them become murderers, stop them in their tracks BEFORE. It is not logical to wait for murders to then use capital punishment, we must use it before the escalation to murder in order to prevent the criminal from graduating to murder, save the lives of would be victims not criminals. It would be a total disruption in the underworld of crime, one that they do not expect, one that they would respect. 10 years of such a policy and TT would be clean of crime, you could put on your jewelry, drive an expensive car, count money careless and nobody would dare to interfere with you because justice coming for their skin not just their freedom. Pull out the weeds so the garden can be beautiful.

    • Passionate and moving, your latter takes a perfectly understandable position because, like many of us, you are damn fed up of the rash of crime with no end, it seems, in sight.

      However, it completely ignores the important little fact that multiple studies the world over have shown that the death penalty is not a deterrent. It might be for law-abiding people; are they at the root of the problem?

      The solution is not an eye for an eye but genuine education anchored in the specificities of our country and our culture.

      Remember the antediluvian insistence by the previous minister of education that no sex education will be taught in our schools? His successor has made no such declaration but is her position different? Does her gender make any difference at all? Is it even on the agenda?

      If and when our classrooms, face-to-face or virtual, begin to come to terms with the realities of Trinidad and Tobago in the 21st Century, then and only then will we have a chance of changing the powerful message that our barely literate men, young and not so young, seem to hear in sleigh bells, which is slay belles.

      • thehandbehindthecurtain

        Thanks for your response but you misunderstood me, I do not want to deter anybody with capital punishment, I want the criminals to be permanently removed, as in d-e-a-d. A dead criminal cannot commit any crime or encourage others to commit crime, because they are gone and they will stay gone, the word is prevention not deterrence. Here I could say ”problem solved”, but of course the problem would not be solved, the symptom would be dealt with but the cause of this is as you correctly mentioned is education. I propose that a new subject be taught, I call it ”Life lessons”. What is Life lessons, in Life lessons students will learn what they need to be good Trinbagonians eg how to solve disputes, how to behave with the police, how to use the legal system, they would read newspaper reports of serious crime (road rage, domestic violence, fraud, drugs, guns, murder etc.) and reenact it in class to see what it is like to be the victim & the perpetrator. I also propose that we start to use an untapped resource in the form of parents of murder victims, real criminals serving life etc., bring them to schools all over TT to talk to children learning Life lessons. They need to hear what will happen to them, because they are the future. And of course they would learn about sex too lol, I don’t get why youth learning about sex is a problem, they are obviously having sex or they want to so it makes sense to explain not just sex (penis, vagina, reproduction, condoms) but also the relations between men and women. There is more to sex than mechanicals, it is also emotional. Another part of Life lessons would be how to save money, how to invest. Isn’t it amazing that many would spend their hard earned money on a Japanese car, use it up, keep working and repeat the process, when maybe they could have invested in stocks etc. and made much more money than they could spend. If we can teach students French and Spanish we can teach them Life lessons, Life lessons is the one that they will obviously need most in life.

        • I don’t want to prolong this unnecessarily but it behoves me to make two points in response:

          (1) “I want the criminals to be permanently removed, as in d-e-a-d.”

          Shakespeare says, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Does that work for crime too? Or is there a PRC or other test that will tell us who belongs in which group?

          How will we be able to distinguish the criminal(s) from the rest unless and until they have already done the deed?

          (2) No self-respecting French and Spanish teacher is ever content to teach the language without the life lessons.

          But self-respect, alas, was removed from the list of prerequisites for teaching somewhere around the time when there was a need to find hundreds of teachers at short notice to staff the junior and senior secondary schools.

          And we have only gone steadily downhill since.

          • thehandbehindthecurtain

            We will distinguish them just as we do today, except they will be gone rather than in prison. We cannot continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result, we need to start giving the criminals the treatment they need. We can think of capital punishment like some medical procedure, except it’s intent is to heal society by removing these criminals. #2 self respect ending, not just with teachers but also with police, how many police officers engaged in serious crime?
            I want especially criminal cops and politicians to be executed, if they are corrupt then we are doomed. Their cases should have priority.
            In 1 month this girl will be forgotten and another 20 or 30 people murdered, everyday another outrageous killing. The UNC is voting against crime bills, how in the hell is that a viable political party. I don’t care about PNM vs UNC, politicians must bring solutions and not fight solutions because they want to sit in the Gov chair and they need chaos to prevail so they can claim to be needed to fix it in a future election. Is Trinidad and Tobago a lost cause? no it is not.
            Read this victims account and what she calls for.
            https://guardian.co.tt/news/pregnant-woman-kidnapped-robbed-raped-recounts-ordeal-6.2.1285847.9dc2c577d9

            • I read your story and I was underwhelmed. I am willing to bet that it does not check out.

              But there’s a larger problem, I think. You and I probably agree on quite a few things but our attitude to the OBJECTIVE facts is different.

              One example: I think a criminal is someone who has already committed a crime; you quite clearly disagree.

              Until I am able to work out just how you define that particular noun, I’m done with this albeit revealing discussion.

              • thehandbehindthecurtain

                Mr.X robs a store, shoots and kills the clerc. Mr.X is arrested based on cctv footage from the store which recorded the crime. Mr.X is charged, tried and convicted. Upon conviction in legal finality obviously factoring in appeals he is no longer innocent, he is guilty and as such subject to be punished.

    • Dead on Totally agree.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.