Trinidad Express freed of lawsuit filed by police officers

A High Court judge in Trinidad and Tobago has dismissed a lawsuit filed by nine police officers who claimed they were libelled by the Trinidad Express newspaper.



In a 28-page ruling handed down yesterday, Justice Frank Seepersad also ordered the police officers to pay the newspaper’s legal costs.



The police officers had argued that they were libelled in three articles and an editorial published by the newspaper in 2008 and 2009.



The lawsuit, which was filed in 2010 after a Coroner’s Inquest cleared them of any wrongdoing in the shooting deaths of five people on August 17, 2007, claimed the articles defamed their characters and brought their names into disrepute.



However, Justice Seepersad said while the articles were capable of bearing defamatory meaning, the names of the claimants were never mentioned in either publication.



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