PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) – Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi has described as “reprehensible” the decision by Opposition legislator Dr Roodal Moonilal to use the ongoing budget debate to show pictures of children holding firearms “with a striking resemblance to senior Government officials”.

Al-Rawi told reporters that while he had not seen the pictures, his family had received a threat assessment and instruction from the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force after he received several death threats since assuming office in September last year.

“I can’t speak for the army or for anything else, but can tell you that threat assessments have to be treated seriously. If the army tells you they have done a threat assessment against you and your family and you have to come in and be informed about it, and if Special Branch tells you there are protocols, you don’t take that lightly,” the attorney general told reporters.

Earlier, Moonilal told Parliament that “it was shocking” for him to have received “photos of young children in this country with high-powered weapons training somewhere.

“I’m told the weapon is the UMP nine millimetre calibre,” he said, adding that they were commonly used by the Defence Force.

“What is more frightening, and I say this with trepidation, is that I am told these children bear a striking resemblance to the children of a senior Cabinet minister,” he said.

“I’d say they are children with a striking resemblance to senior Government officials. I will now ask the attorney general – I’ll pass it to him – if he recognises the children in this photo.”

Moonilal said that he understood the pictures were taken out in October 2015 and posted on a Facebook page named, ‘Kick out the PNM (People’s National Movement)’.

“It is wrong to tell the children of Laventille, Beetham, Enterprise, Penal, Debe, Barrackpore that they should not take up guns, but then we have our own children taking up guns. If what I am saying is correct it speaks to recklessness, it speaks to a breach of the criminal law, it speaks of an abuse of office, it speaks of an unfitness to hold public office.

“And if anyone is deemed to be responsible for these children, they ought to demit public office today,” Moonilal said during his contribution to the debate on the TT$53.4-billion budget on Tuesday.

But speaking to reporters, Al-Rawi said that after the threats and upon the instructions of the army in particular, “my family was taken up to the Cumuto [army] base where instructions [about] threats to our persons were provided.”