The police in Dominica say they have received no credible leads as the search for a 12-year-old child that was abducted earlier this week enters its fourth day.
At a press conference on Saturday morning Assistant Commissioner of Police, Lincoln Corbette said the police have received up to 15 leads, including “visions”, but none have been successful so far.
“We are not getting any credible lead as yet as to the whereabouts of the young lady or the suspect,” he said. “And regardless of that, we are pushing, we are pushing as hard as we can.”
He said the police are following every single lead they have received.
“We had many reports of sighting all over the place,” Corbette stated. “Over 10, 12, 15 maybe and we have followed every one of them. Every one of them, we followed them but so far we have not been successful.”
He pointed out that some of the leads have been “very strange” but the police have followed them anyway.
“Even people who had visions, we followed them,” he said. “We are taking no chances because we want to find this child.”
Meanwhile, Corbette said the police are adjusting the search operation when it comes to members of the public.
“We’ve seen some injuries to members of the public,” he explained. “We’ve seen cuts, we’ve seen lacerations taking up to five, seven or more stitches. We’ve also seen people coming who are not properly attired, coming with slippers and sneakers and you could well understand they are going into this sort of terrain with all these wet conditions and you might well get yourself getting injured and you have to be rescued.”
Corbette went on to say that volunteers are also getting lost.
“That in itself takes away some of our time and resources while we should be focused on looking for the young lady, we have to now go out there looking for people who are part of the team, ” he said. “Again as I said they are very enthusiastic but a lot of them are not really trained or adapted to the conditions out there. So as I said, we had to refocus out strategy on some of our approach.”
He explained it is not to discourage people from assisting in the search but to get the best assistance that is required.
“I won’t be going into details as to how we going forward with our operation from there but to say, as I said before, we are sparing no effort whatsoever until we get this young lady back to her family,” Corbette said. “That is our main and primary objective is to get young Kernisha Etienne back in the safe hands of her family.”
Kernisha Etienne was abducted from her home in Warner on Tuesday night by Kian Alexander, who the police said is of unsound mind.
He disappeared in bushes surrounding the house and there have been no traces of them since.
