Two Portland men were chopped to death Friday night in what police said were unrelated incidents, bringing the number of murders in the parish since January 1 to four.

Dead are 32-year-old Ian Bryce of Skibo district in the western part of the parish and 65-year-old Ephraim Wallace of Muirton Pen district in the parish’s eastern end.

The Buff Bay police said Bryce and another man, Alton Wilson, got into a heated argument at a shop in Skibo district. A machete was produced and Bryce was allegedly chopped.

The bleeding man was rushed to the Annotto Bay Hospital in nearby St Mary but succumbed to his injuries while undergoing treatment.

The police are currently pursuing Wilson who allegedly went on the run after the incident.

“We’re still in search of Wilson,” a police constable from the Buff Bay station told the Observer yesterday. “We have not received any information as yet but we are expecting to hear something very soon and we hope that within the next two days, we will be able to apprehend him.”

However, the policeman said their job was being made difficult by the mountainous terrain of the parish and by a lack of technological support.

“We don’t have the sort of technical ability to have the police in tune with what is happening in other parishes. I’m not talking about just a telephone connection but a computer database that would involve a single system of computers for police all over the island,” the constable said.

“He (Wilson) could easily be in St Mary now or in Kingston having a drink and nobody would be the wiser,” said the frustrated cop.

He added that this was one of the reasons the police were lobbying for the government to grant them access to the database of fingerprints of registered voters collected by the Electoral Office of Jamaica.

In the Muirton Pen incident, Wallace’s body, which had several machete wounds, was stumbled upon by a passer-by at about 10:00 o’clock Saturday morning.

The Port Antonio police said their preliminary investigations showed that the man was killed between 9:00 and 10:00 pm the previous evening.

“No suspects have yet been identified but we are investigating. We don’t think they are related,” a police spokesman said.