National Security Minister Dwight Nelson said the round-the-clock police guard would remain in place as long as necessary and warned criminals who continue to target the hospital that “they will do so at their own peril.”
He ordered the beefed up security after gangsters threatened to shoot up the hospital on Saturday night.
A day earlier, armed men invaded the facility about 2:30 a.m. and robbed staff of cash, cellular phones and jewellery. A doctor was physically assaulted.
A similar robbery occurred at the same hospital in July last year.
Minister of Health Rudyard Spencer has condemned the latest attack on the hospital.
“There is a pattern emerging that we do not like and we wish those criminal minded persons would allow suffering people to access medical attention and our staff to do their work without fear of incidents such as this,” he said, adding that the staff were left traumatized.
Spencer said he hopes the perpetrators will be swiftly brought to justice and urged members of the community to assist the police in their investigations.
The men involved in the hospital incident are believed to be aligned to the Clansman gang which has been blamed for a gun attack on the Spanish Town Police Station and nearby communities on the night of Thursday, 10th March, 2011. No one was hurt in that incident.
(Parts of this article were written with submissions from a Caribbean360 report)