Jailed and raped in Barbados

Jailed and raped in Barbados
Horrific allegations of another J'can woman
BY KARYL WALKER
Sunday, April 10, 2011


THE 27-year-old Jamaican woman who has accused officers of the Royal Barbados Police Force of rape and sexual assault has given a graphic and horrific account of the treatment she said was meted out to her after she was jailed in that country two months ago for drug smuggling.
The Sunday Observer obtained a copy of her signed statement, in which the woman, whose name we have been asked not to reveal, described the men she accused of the crime.

According to the woman, who lives in Spanish Town, she arrived at the Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados on a Caribbean Airlines flight from Jamaica on Saturday, February 26. She cleared immigration, but was stopped by customs officials who searched her bag and found approximately two kilos of ganja hidden in a secret compartment.
She was strip-searched and taken to the Oistins Police Station where officers took a statement from her, but denied her the opportunity to make a phone call. They also denied her the opportunity to seek legal counsel, she said, and mocked her by saying that no lawyer would take her case because she had no money.
Later that night, she was transferred to the Central Police Station in Bridgetown, where she again gave a statement. She was then placed in a cell where, over the course of the next day, she alleged, she was raped, sexually assaulted and verbally abused by police officers.
According to the woman, after being locked in the cell, she heard a man call her name. The man, who she said was dressed in a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans, questioned her about her life in Jamaica, verbally taunted her, forced her to take a tablet he gave to her after which he demanded sex.
“When I took the tablet I felt like I was floating. I felt reckless and tired, but I was conscious of what was going on around me,” she said.
“He asked me if I didn’t want to have sex and I said ‘Sex? Sex a di least a my problems right now. Sex a di last thing pon my mind’. He said I had to have some sex with him before I go to Dodds (prison), so I started to cry,” she said.


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