Prime Minister Dean Barrow is on personal leave in the United States, according to a release from his office. The PM departed the country today and is scheduled to return next Tuesday. Minister of Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs Wilfred Elrington is acting as Prime Minister until the PM returns.
Before nine o’clock this morning, the lifeless body of a baby was found by a sanitation worker at East Canal in Belize City. The full-term baby boy, with his umbilical cord, was stuffed in a black plastic bag and dumped in the dirty water from where it was retrieved by the worker who says he […]
David and Anke Doehm are scheduled to appear in the Supreme Court this Friday for a bail hearing. The duo is spending time at the central prison in Hattieville having been charged with “Cruelty to a Child” in respect of the death of their adopted daughter Faye Lin Cannon. The girl was found lifeless inside […]
The Gang Suppression Unit has been under the leadership of Superintendent Andres Makin since the beginning of July when transfers within the Belize Police Department came into effect. While the GSU is being led by a new boss, his predecessor is reportedly under investigation by the Ministry of Home Affairs which oversees that arm of […]
An accident early this morning claimed the life of thirty-nine-year-old Dorla Flores, a cook of Seine Bight village, Stann Creek District. According to police nineteen year old Obed Mojano of Blackman Eddy village, Cayo District, was driving a Chevrolet Silverado from Seine Bight south toward Placencia when upon reaching the area near the end of […]
Tonight, Youth Apprenticeship Program Coordinator and Mediator, Dianne Finnegan is lashing out at the recently installed Regional Commander of Eastern Division South, Marco Vidal. On Wednesday, the Senior Superintendent told the press that his priority is policing the streets of the city and not engaging in mediation with gangs, in reference to his predecessor, Assistant […]
According to Finnegan, millions of dollars have been invested into organizations and institutions that work with at risk youths and gang members to curb criminal activities, with no success. Finnegan says that if organizations, such as the Conscious Youth Development Program, were doing their job, there wouldn’t be a need for independent mediation. Dianne […]
Two years after the start of construction, the Belize City Center is about to be completed. The multipurpose facility is state-of-the-art and can accommodate up to four thousand spectators. It is designed by brothers Daniel and Carlo Arguelles of International Environments. But how much is being spent on the complex? I.E. representative Daniel says they […]
In 2014, Retired Superintendent of Police Julio Valdez, then-deputy of National Crimes Investigation Branch, wrote the Director of Public Prosecutions, Cheryl-Lynn Vidal, concerning his investigation into a trove of files removed from the Immigration Department in October of 2013, at the height of the Elvin Penner scandal. Those files were retrieved from attorney-at-law Arthur Saldivar […]
The former senior cop stated that this branch of the investigation came about after his colleagues in Belize City spoke with Saldivar and retrieved the files. But when he attempted to access the original files at the Department, Valdez told the Committee, he was denied because an internal Immigration audit was underway and what became […]
The only man above Valdez, indeed above all officers in the Police Department, is Commissioner Allen Whylie. Appointed in 2013, he was previously C.E.O. in the Ministry of National Security, and later Defence and Immigration when it was split between 2010 and 2012. Appearing this afternoon, he was confronted with Valdez’s testimony and staunchly maintained […]
The Commissioner blames ‘media spin’ for the misunderstanding and what he says is his subsequent decision to withdraw from any administrative handling of either the ‘missing files’ case or the Won Hong Kim case. But at the end of the day, he conceded that even he does not know how the former case turned out […]
But what was among that list of files handed over? Valdez read a fairly long list of nationality files and accompanying documents for some familiar names such as Yiu-Pang Chen and Quoc Vinh Truong who would show up in the Audit Report. What he noticed from his long experience as a cop, including stints commanding […]
Speaking of background checks, were the Police Department or Ministry of Immigration consulted about the Cabinet’s decision to stop Special Branch police from carrying out the standard background checks on applicants for nationality? Commissioner of Police Allen Whylie indicated that he was not even sure if the check was a legal requirement or merely an […]
We’ll come back to the senate hearings later, but a Belize City resident wanted for the stabbing death of Phillip Samuels has surrendered himself to police and is being held in custody pending an arraignment for murder. Cecil Gill, the prime suspect in the vicious attack of the thirty-one-year-old, turned himself in earlier today. On […]
Early on Monday night, thirty-one-year-old Phillip Michael Samuels was stabbed and killed. Samuels was hanging out with a group of friends at an apartment on Boots Crescent, Belize City when he was stabbed once to the chest. Witnesses say that Samuels intervened in a fight in which a man hit a woman, and that decision […]
While police continue to look for a Belize City resident in connection with the recent murder of Phillip Samuels, Regional Commander for the Eastern Division South jurisdiction, Superintendent Marco Vidal says that they are also seeking suspects in the murder of Hammond Lemoth. Lemoth succumbed to multiple gunshot injuries last Thursday, almost two months after […]
Superintendent Vidal also addressed the puzzling disappearance of forty-nine-year-old Mark Pollard who vanished approximately two weeks ago without a trace. The well-known man left his house on Peter Seco Street, Belize City, for his routine morning exercise to the Haulover Bridge and back. Surveillance cameras captured him running up the Phillip Goldson Highway, but never […]
The bail application for David and Anke Doehm, the American couple charged with cruelty to late thirteen-year-old daughter Faye Lin Cannon, will be heard at the Supreme Court on Friday. Attorney for David Doehm, Richard ‘Dickie’ Bradley, confirmed this afternoon to News Five that he and Anke’s attorney, Senior Counsel Ellis Arnold, have filed their […]
News Five has confirmed that the Senate Special Select Committee is taking a different tack for its hearing on Wednesday at the National Assembly in Belmopan. For the last two weeks, four Ministers of Government have been testifying about their activities in relation to the Immigration Department. Now for the first time, the Committee is […]
A team of young athletes is destined for Honduras in the weeks ahead to represent the Jewel in the Under-fifteen CODICADER games. Their attendance however, does not exempt Belize from facing sanctions in the near future, since the outing had been scheduled ahead of government’s recent announcement that it cannot afford to host the Disability […]
In 2016, under the direction of Minister of State Elodio Aragon Junior, whose responsibility at the time included sports and culture, the National Sports Council spent in excess of four hundred thousand dollars in hosting the CODICADER Games. This time around, expenses would be considerably less since only two disciplines will be featured in the […]
Belize City voters will head to the polls on August twenty-seventh to elect the ten city councilors and one mayoral candidate to represent the United Democratic Party at next year’s municipal elections. The U.D.P. has won the Belize City Council four straight times since 2006. But their chances at a fifth term have gotten somewhat […]
Mayor Bradley is presently out of the country and city residents will have to wait until he gets back to hear his explanation. But one possible reason is that the tough-talking administrator is no stranger to taking hard stances against his party. Recently, he was among those who openly cried shame on members of the […]
Seventeen days after his murder, police believe they have cracked the murder of Bangladeshi national, twenty-nine-year-old Abdush Salam. This morning, a twenty-three-year-old man from the Toledo District was arraigned for Salam’s murder which occurred on July first, 2017 inside his home. Juan Roberto Choc from Jordan, Toledo appeared before Senior Magistrate Sharon Fraser and was […]
