The Jamaican authorities vowed yesterday to step up their already substantial co-operation with British law enforcement against drug gangs which may have connections on both sides of the Atlantic, as the island prepares for a backlash from the New Year’s Day gun killing of two teenaged girls in the west midland city of Birmingham.

“We already have good co-operation with the British and we are open to enhancing those,” said the national security minister, Peter Phillips. “.We recognise there is a transnational component to some of the criminal activity that takes place among Jamaicans, both in Jamaica and the UK. On account of that recognition, we have been co-operating with British law enforcement and will deepen that engagement.”

Twin sisters Charlene and Sophie Ellis, 18 and their cousins, Latisha Shakespear and Cheryl Shaw, both 17, were hit by a hail of gunfire when they went outside for fresh air from a party at a hairdressing salon near Birmingham’s city centre.

Charlene and Latisha were killed instantly. Sophie remains in hospital under police guard, in a stable condition after surgery, and Cheryl has been released from hospital, having been treated for a wound to the hand.

No specific connection has been made between Jamaica and the incident, but it has served to focus British national attention on black-on-black and drug-related violence in the country’s inner-cities. Inevitably, the British press is filled with references to Yardie gangs and the Yardie-inspired home-grown variety called Homeboys.

The obvious next step is the link to Jamaica, the recruiting ground and ancestral home of the Yardies, who first gained notoriety in the 1980s for their ruthless violence in London and other UK cities in fighting for turf and control of the crack cocaine trade.

The upshot was a raising of a negative image of Jamaica, compounded by the fact that the island emerged as an important transshipment point for the smuggling of cocaine from Colombia to Britain and the rest of Europe.

In the past year, Jamaica has worked closely with the British authorities on the drug trade and has apparently been making progress in slowing the flow of narcotics from the island. Fewer negative stories, which help to hurt tourism and investment prospects, have been in the British media.

That is the way that Maxine Roberts, the new Jamaican high commissioner in London, and her bosses in Kingston, would like to keep it.

“The high commissioner is following the situation closely,” said foreign ministry spokesman Wilton Dyer.

But it will be difficult to keep Jamaica’s name out of the emerging political and law enforcement fray that has begun to emerge, and likely to deepen in the coming weeks.

Already the home secretary, David Blunkett, is under pressure to do something about gun crime, and there were signals that he may strengthen a Criminal Justice and Sentencing Bill now before Parliament by proposing a mandatory five-year sentence for anyone held with an illegal gun.

In the five years to 2001, gun crimes in England and Wales increased by 22 per cent and last year 39 of the 43 police forces expressed concern about the growing rate of robberies, often with guns.

“Gun crime and its connections with the drugs trade is beginning to overshadow other efforts being made to reduce crime and the fear of crime,” the chief inspector of constabulary, Sir Keith Povey, lamented recently.

Private ownership of handguns was banned in the UK after the 1996 massacre in Dunblane, Scotland when a lone gunman killed 16 students and a teacher, then shot himself dead.

But in Birmingham and the inner-cities of other British cities, where gang and gun violence are on the rise, getting a gun is apparently not particularly difficult. The going rate for a pistol, according to recent British newspaper reports, is around £30.

Gangs, Yardies and Homeboys, use these cheaply, and easily acquired weapons to deadly affect.

Sometimes innocent people get caught in the cross-fire – as the West Midlands police assume to have been the case with Charlene, Sophie, Latisha and Cheryl.

“It could be gang-related,” Detective Superintendent Dave Mirfield, the officer leading the inquiry, told British newspapers yesterday. “I would not be naive enough to think it would not be. My overwhelming thoughts are that these girls are innocent and were caught up in an exchange of fire.”

Indeed, the Uniseven salon, where the girls attended the party on Birchfield Road near Aston, is between two areas where rival Homeboys gangs – the Johnson Crew, from Aston, and the Burger Bar Boys, from Lozells – have, for nearly a decade, fought for turf.

Apparently, the Yardies and the Homeboys generally keep out of each other’s way, but the British-born gangsters imitate the ruthlessness, style and culture of some of their Jamaican-born counterparts.

“There has certainly been some copycat influence of the Yardies’ culture,” West Midlands police Detective Inspector Chris Pretty, told the on-line edition of the British national daily, the Guardian. “What we have seen recently is that guns have become a fashion accessory for some Homeboys. We are aware of 14 year-olds with handguns.”

Pretty heads Operation Ventara, which is patterned off Operation Trident, the London police operation, to which 250 police are assigned. Operation Ventara targets Yardie-style crime.

In 2002, Pretty’s group made 57 arrests for gun-related crime and recovered 92 illegal firearms. But the frequency and boldness of the shootings that have been witnessed in Birmingham have shocked the community, even though the types of attacks have been fairly common in Kingston’s inner-city areas.

“The fact is that we have a sub-culture of violence and criminality that is destroying some communities here and Jamaican communities abroad,” Phillips said yesterday. “.We need to accept that if we are going to recover our reputation, we are just going to have to confront that criminality which is in our communities here. It is just a fact of life.”

Although officials say that some of the killings in British black communities that have been labelled as being committed by Yardies are not necessarily by Jamaican and Jamaican-affiliated gangs, the styles often mirror what happens in Kingston’s toughest neighbourhoods.

In one case last April, storekeepers and shoppers had to scramble for cover in Edgbaston in broad daylight when a gunman fired at least five bullets into a BMW carrying 22 year-old Ashi Walker. Police said the shooting was part of a drugs war.

Often police make little headway in the investigations as witnesses remain quiet, as was the case last March when Gladstone Johnson was shot dead at a West Indian club before hundreds of witnesses. Apparently nobody saw a thing.

So far, the same thing is happening in the case of the New Year’s Day killings, in which the firing was from sub-machine guns.

“Somebody knows something and we need them to come forward – family friends or whoever,” Mirfield told UK reporters. “I need the people that were at the party at the time to come forward. I need people who were outside and anyone who knows anything about this to make contact.”

It is believed that members of drug gangs often flit between Kingston and London and other UK cities, which is a loophole that the authorities in the UK and Jamaica are keen to plug.

Already, British police work in Jamaica under an arrangement that Phillips hammered out on a visit to Britain last March, when the Tony Blair administration, which is already helping in the training of the Jamaican constabulary, committed another $130 million for equipment of the island’s security forces.

Additionally, two Jamaican officers are soon to be assigned to Scotland Yard to help the Metropolitan Police to identify Jamaican criminals and generally act as liaisons between the Jamaican and UK forces.

“This is one way of deepening the relationship in our mutual fight against the drug trade and wanton criminality,” said Phillips.

Indeed, Phillips has worked hard at deepening this relationship. In just over a year since he took over the security portfolio, Phillips has made three visits to the UK, the latest being last November, for talks with ministers and police.

In the that period, at least three senior UK officials have come to Jamaica on similar missions.

In April, Home Office Parliamentary Undersecretary Robert Ainsworth visited the island for talks with Phillips, and he was followed in July by the head of Scotland Yard, Sir John Stevens, and Lord Toby Harris, the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority. These visits were followed by formal anti-narcotics pact between the two countries.

Phillips insisted yesterday that headway was being made.

IonScan machines, donated by the British government, used to detect traces of narcotics, have helped to dramatically cut the number of drug mules passing through Jamaican airports heading for the UK. More are being caught.

Phillips, in this context, noted that the British press have cut their frequent finger-point at Air Jamaica as an airline that transports cocaine.

“It is possible to win victories,” he said. “The Air Cocaine thing has been blunted. It is now to expand on these.”

– Observer reporters, British newspapers & wire services