CAMBRIDGE, St James — After escaping numerous dragnets, one of the country’s most wanted men — 25-year-old Delano Wilmot, alias “Prekeh Boy” — was shot dead by members of a joint police/military team during an operation in the bushes of Amity in Cambridge, St James, yesterday.

The police say an M16 rifle and several rounds of ammunition were seized following the operation.

According to head of the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Corporate Communications Unit (CCU) Senior Superintendent Stephanie Lindsay, the confrontation between Wilmot and the security forces unfolded some time after 7:00 am.

“Members of the joint secretary forces carried out an operation where there was some exchange of gunfire, and, at the end, an M16 rifle was seized and one male received injuries and later succumbed at hospital,” SSP Lindsay told the Jamaica Observer.

The senior superintendent of police said no member of the security forces’ team was injured during the incident.

Wilmot, the reputed leader of the Retrieve Gang or Prekeh Gang, who was from Retrieve in St James, was listed as wanted following the murder of Mark Williams in June 2016. The police said since then, the gang has been linked to no fewer than 12 murders and 11 shootings, to include incidents of shooting at members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force in St James.

Since the implementation of the state of public emergency that is currently on in St James, several operations have been conducted by the security forces; however, Wilmot and his cronies, who lived in the woods, proved to be elusive.

More recently, the St James most wanted man and his associates were fingered in the July 9, 2020 killing of Allister Godfrey in Catadupa in the parish.

The gang leader is said to have driven fear into residents of Cambridge and surrounding communities, which is where he and his outfit supposedly extorted, robbed and killed.

It was reportedly common for the gangsters, strapped with handguns and slinging high-powered rifles, to openly walk around in the communities.

Wilmot, who reportedly formed the Prekeh Gang and was wanted for numerous serious offences, including murders and shootings, initially appeared on the police’s radar during the Ratty Gang’s reign of terror on residents of Retrieve and Cambridge.

He was reportedly a former “lieutenant” of that gang, which was led by Ryan “Ratty” Peterkin who was killed, along with one of his alleged gang members, on April 14, 2018, in a house in Berkshire district in Westmoreland, after challenging a joint police/military team in a firefight.

On November 13, 2018, Wilmot eluded a security forces’ team who carried out a massive operation in St James in search of the gang leader and his cronies.

An alleged top-tier member of the gang, Richard Anderson, alias ‘Cruz’, was killed during that operation.

At the time, Anderson was listed as wanted by the East Kingston police. The police recovered one Panther Arms A15 rifle during that operation, in which Wilmot was theorised to have been shot.

Two months earlier, two Jamaica Defence Force soldiers were shot and injured in an operation to capture the gangsters. However, Wilmot and his cronies managed to escape after shooting the soldiers.

A team from the Independent Commission of Investigations visited the scene in St James yesterday, according to the director of complaints for the commission’s Western Division Errol Chattoo.

“INDECOM has processed the scene and received initial account from members of the security forces,” Chattoo told the Observer last night.