JUNCTION, St Elizabeth – The St Elizabeth police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the smashing of the rear windscreen of a car carrying ruling People’s National Party (PNP) supporters following a late-night mass rally in Junction, South-East St Elizabeth on Wednesday.

Police reported the driver as saying that while travelling towards Cheapside on his way from Junction he heard a “loud explosion” and on stopping the car about “10 chains” further on he realised that the rear screen had been shattered. The driver reportedly said that the incident happened as he drove past people gathered at a bar “on the right-hand side of the road”.

A senior police officer told the Observer that “Scene of Crime persons” had been called in to assess the car, which was kept overnight at the Junction Police Station. The driver of the car was also expected at the station yesterday to make a formal statement.

Police say the incident “apparently” occurred sometime after 11:00 pm, long before the 12:30 am closure of the meeting at which Prime Minister and PNP President Portia Simpson Miller addressed a large crowd and formally opened the new constituency office of the party’s candidate for South-East St Elizabeth, businessman Norman Horne. The meeting followed a motorcade tour of sections of the constituency.

Efforts by the Observer to reach Horne by telephone yesterday failed. When contacted, Horne’s Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) opponent Frank Witter said he could not comment on the alleged incident since “I have heard nothing official, I am only hearing things on the street”.

Witter argued that “if in fact an incident occurred” it may have flowed from the lateness of the meeting, which he claimed was in breach of the law. The claim of illegality was flatly rejected by the police yesterday.

Witter charged that “the law says that all motorcades must end at 6:00 pm and the PNP motorcade went late into the night”, and that “the law says that all meetings must end by 12:00 pm and the meeting went well beyond that…”

But yesterday, Superintendent Howard Francis, head of the St Elizabeth police, said the law being referred to by Witter applied to “political” and not public events. Francis said that under the law, Wednesday’s PNP motorcade through SE St Elizabeth, and the rally which followed in Junction, fell under the latter category.

“They would only be designated ‘political’ between nomination day and election day,” said Francis.