Gun Shots in Antigua

Jamaica Observer

Antigua is probably most famous for being the birthplace of the legendary West Indies cricketer Viv Richards. But one of the big media stories this week in Britain has been the gunning down in Antigua of two young British tourists Catherine and Benjamin Mullaney. Catherine was shot in the head and died on the scene.  Benjamin is on life-support but is apparently brain dead.

The story has had a lot of coverage in newspapers and on television partly because it is a very touching one. They were a young couple from Wales who had been married for just two weeks. Both husband and wife were in the medical profession. And they were on honeymoon in the upmarket COCOS hotel. On its website the hotel describes itself as “an exclusive resort for those looking to escape to paradise. COCOS offers complete peace and tranquillity, an abandon from the stress of life, where your every need is catered for” It goes on to describe the cottages that make up the resort. “ Each cottage suite has been designed in true Caribbean style with spacious airy rooms, dark wood floors and white linens... the feeling of peaceful energy can be sensed when you walk in the door”. It was on this island paradise and in one of those cottages that the Catherine and Benjamin were gunned down at five in the morning. Tourists in the neighbouring cottages have described how they heard Catherine scream three times and then gunshots.

Antigua’s murder rate is tiny compared to Jamaica. Last year there were seventeen murders on Antigua and Barbuda. But shootings, gang warfare and robbery are on the rise. This murder is believed to be a robbery gone wrong. And even seventeen murders are too many on a tiny island which markets itself as a haven of tranquillity. Concern about the crime led Antigua to follow the Jamaican example and bring in a foreigner (from Canada) to help run their police force. Commissioner Gary Nelson said "We are all deeply shocked and saddened - this is the first visitor homicide in over 10 years and it is a situation we never want to see repeated," In such a small island it ought not to be too difficult to find the suspects, but although persons are being questioned, at the time of writing nobody has been charged.

Jamaicans may imagine that a shooting in the Leeward Islands has little to do with them. But the British tends to lump all the Caribbean together at the best of times. And they have seized on this shooting to write articles about how dangerous the Caribbean is for tourists. In one of these articles Jamaica is described as “the most murderous place in the Caribbean”

Nobody knows how much money those gun men in Antigua thought they could make by robbing those tourists. But, however profitable they imagined their robbery would be, it is just a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars that the Caribbean stands to lose if widely publicised incidents like these keep the tourists away. Crime and violence is a tragedy for individuals, families and the nation. But it is increasingly a threat to the economic well-being of the entire Caribbean. 

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