Articles - News

   Top Saint Lucian hotelier Andrew Barnard believes the island's North American Road Show series for travel partners is helping to put it on the map, and that with new airlift coming on stream, Saint Lucia is well positioned for bumper business.

   Natasha St Louis notched six goals to fire Trinidad and Tobago's Under-20 team to an emphatic 11-1 crushing of St Lucia in their first leg encounter of the Caribbean Football Union Women's Qualifiers on Monday night.

   The 121st International Olympic Committee Session is going to restart today, Wednesday, in Copenhagen with elections of president, members and events on its agenda.

   Troubled British singer Amy Winehouse, who secluded herself in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia earlier this year, spent a fortune on her wild nights out during a seven-month stay there, it has surfaced.

   Why would the material witness in a rape case be deported before investigations into the case had even begun? Home affairs minister Guy Mayers told the STAR yesterday, “There are two different cases. One is an immigration case and the other one is a rape case. Because there is a rape doesn’t mean that the person cannot be sent back to their country of origin. When the witness is required to give evidence, they will be asked to come back.”

But the Jamaican woman known only as ‘Donna’ was not even sent back to her own country by St Lucian immigration authorities. She said she was flown to the Bahamas where she pleaded not to be sent back to St Lucia where she spent weeks in police custody, allegedly without adequate food, which is the right of all prisoners and detainees.

Questions about the woman who says she was raped in St Lucia before being deported by authorities are turning into an international incident.

The Jamaican dancer who was allegedly raped by a St Lucian police officer has triggered off an investigation by the Jamaican foreign office and heightened anti-St Lucian sentiments in that island. The dancer was picked up by immigration authorities for illegal entry into St Lucia and held at the Richfond Police Station for a week before she was deported.

This would not have been a problem if this were merely a case of illegal entry. But now there is a big problem, one that puts pressure on relations between the governments of St Lucia and Jamaica.

The problem is that before she was deported, she was allegedly raped by a 19-year-old police officer. Unconfirmed reports are that the officer has signed a confession. His bail was set at $7,000. The Jamaican has since gone to the Jamaican media with her story and it has sparked off a firestorm in that country, with many Jamaicans commenting on websites that St Lucian police are even worse than their Jamaican counterparts. (Jamaican police have been stereotyped by their own people and media in the past as unreasonable, excessively violent and chronically corrupt.)

In the controversial case of the rape victim who was deported, questions are much easier to get than answers. The obvious question is why would the material witness in an ongoing rape investigation be forced to leave the island? How much will it cost the public purse to return her to this island? Will ‘Donna’ even want to return to St Lucia when the rape case against her alleged abuser is called? Is that the intention?