GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AFP) - Trinidad and Tobago is to provide 'specialised weapons' and a helicopter to help Guyana combat a spate of violent mass killings, Guyana's home affairs minister said Wednesday.

"The Government of Guyana has been making every effort to procure the said weapons from other sources but without success," said the minister, Clement Rohee.

In the latest major violent incident in the South American country, gunmen killed nine civilians and stormed a police station, killing three policemen and stealing guns on Sunday.
No details have been provided about the types of weapons which Rohee said the government had been trying to acquire elsewhere.

Guyana's security forces do not have any working helicopters to conduct aerial patrols of the 83,000-square- mile country including its vast Amazon jungle, savannahs, rivers, and mountains.

Through these, cocaine, arms and ammunition are smuggled, most of it shipped to North America and Europe.
In the wake of Sunday's brazen attack in the gold-mining township of Bartica, 80 miles south-west of the capital Georgetown, President Bharrat Jagdeo told residents there that Guyana's 5,000 police and soldiers were "stretched thinly".

Though they were highly trained and equipped, a major problem was lack of credible intelligence, he said.
Provision of the weapons, he said, followed talks between himself and Trinidad and Tobago's National Security Minister Martin Joseph on how that country could help its sister Caribbean Community (Caricom) member state that has lost 23 people in two violent massacres already this year.

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