The Bottle of Malathion Used to Poison San Vicente Village Was Illegally Imported

The person, who attempted to poison almost two thousand residents of San Vicente Village, Toledo District sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning last week, has still not been arrested. If ever that individual is caught, he might be facing additional charges aside from those related to attempting to poison a village. That’s because the Pesticides Control Board has indicated that the bottle of Malathion fifty-seven E.C. formula that the person emptied into the village’s water supply reservoir was not a registered formulation in Belize, and since Belize makes Malathion, the importation of that bottle was illegal. The Board has issued a press release informing that Malathion, the active ingredient of the formulated pesticide is, like any other pesticide, a poison whose unintended uses can be fatal or cause serious health issues for people. While the board, its partners and a task force assigned to investigate the incident enhance the pesticide management frame work to prevent it from recurring, the police are trying to capture the culprit. At Monday’s press brief, the department’s Director of Communications, Assistant Superintendent Fitzroy Yearwood explained that the investigation from the police standpoint remains an open one.

A.S.P. Fitzroy Yearwood

A.S.P. Fitzroy Yearwood, Director of Communications, Belize Police Department

“No one has been arrested and charged for that. Investigators are still doing their best to find the orchestrator of that crime. Poisoning a water system is like a public terror. You can cause harm to more than one person and in these villages, we know that they rely on the water [system] for everything, so we are not letting go that investigation.”

A number of the villagers became ill and had to seek medical treatment following the poisoning.