PRIME Minister P J Patterson yesterday condemned the “vicious and cowardly” murders of eight people, including three women and two children over two days in the Red Hills Road area of St Andrew, and said that the perpetrators must be caught and dealt with using the full measure of the law.

“The Jamaican people have suffered enough of this senseless violence. Gunmen, whatever their guise, cannot be allowed free reign in any portion of our country,” the prime minister said in a statement to the press yesterday.

He said he had been assured by the minister of national security and justice and the police commissioner, that no stone would be left unturned in the efforts to apprehend those responsible for the shootings at One Hundred and Park Lanes, the two communities which have had sporadic conflicts, some of them politically motivated.

Six people, including a woman and her seven- and 13 year-old daughters, were slaughtered in a bloody rampage shortly after midnight Wednesday when a gang of murderers armed with assault rifles entered One Hundred Lane and sprayed two houses with bullets. They then set the houses on fire. Police believe the killings were reprisals for a similar attack on Tuesday night in the nearby Park Lane which killed one man and injured another. Tuesday night’s killers were dressed in police denim.

Yesterday, Patterson commiserated with the families of the dead people and urged “all well-thinking Jamaicans” to condemn the killings.

National security minister, Peter Phillips, said the police would re-establish a command post in the general vicinity of the communities and would implement “other measures” to restore calm. A police post had been established in the area in 2000, but the constabulary, short of about 1,000 men, closed the post last July.

Meanwhile Opposition spokesman on national security and justice, Derrick Smith, blamed the removal of the police post for making the communities vulnerable to acts of terror. Smith chided the security forces for being caught off-guard and unprepared when they should have anticipated the attack in the aftermath of the New Year’s Day shooting in Park Lane, and said the police high command owed Jamaicans an explanation for the failure to arrive on the scene earlier.

Phillips, who only last November inherited the national security portfolio, has been studying proposals for long-term solutions to the frightening crime problem and is expected to take to cabinet shortly a set of measures for the executive’s approval. Yesterday, he called the pre-dawn murders “acts of savagery” and said the perpetrators were “cowards” for targeting women and children — the essential life-givers of society, who should be protected and not abused and murdered.

“This latest act of brutality only goes to emphasise the need for the society as a whole to combine its efforts to isolate these gunmen and their associates who are determined to reign terror on the people of Jamaica,” Phillips said.

“Jamaicans have known violence, but these acts of terror impede our progress and threaten our way of life as a country and cannot be allowed to go unchallenged,” he said. “Violence, of whatever sort, must be resisted.”

The People’s National Party’s Caucus of Young Professionals which calls itself the Patriots; the PNP itself, the National Democratic Movement and the Police Federation also issued statements condemning the murders.

The Patriots’ statement blamed the JLP for creating political division in the midst of the “brutal and savage slayings” although it did not say how the opposition party had done that.

The group said the murders were clear attempts by “desperate elements” to create mayhem, fear and panic and said the perpetrators must be “hunted down and brought to justice”. The group also called on the government to implement the death penalty for “heinous crimes such as these”.

The PNP also accused the JLP for seeking political mileage from the incidents although the murders were “so gruesome that it was obscene for anyone to try to gain political capital from it”.

The Police Federation, an association of rank-and-file cops, called on people who have information to give it to the police. The federation also offered condolences to the families of those killed.

“We are also appealing to those groups and individuals who take to the streets and airwaves to lambast the police when gunmen engage the police in shoot-outs and are killed, to come out and condemn this gruesome attack on the lives of those seven innocent people who also had a right to life,” a statement from the Federation said.