BLOODY BATTLE

KINGSTON – Jamaica’s security forces clashed  for a second day with masked gunmen allied with an alleged drug kingpin facing extradition to the United States, as fighting spread yesterday to more volatile slums around the capital.Police and soldiers came under sustained heavy fire in the West Kingston stronghold of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who has been indicted in the United States on drug and arms trafficking charges. Military helicopters with mounted guns buzzed above the impoverished area between plumes  of black smoke.A series of explosions boomed across West Kingston while hundreds of security agents assaulted Coke’s barricaded base of Tivoli Gardens in a coordinated operation against drug gangsters, whose arsenals rival police firepower.Exact details were not known about casualties. Authorities said two officers had been killed and at least six wounded since Sunday, and  at least one Jamaican soldier was shot dead during yesterday’s  fighting at Tivoli Gardens, the island’s first  housing project.A woman in the besieged slum told Radio Jamaica that she and her terrified family were hunkered down in their apartment as a firefight raged outside.“I really pray that somebody will find the love in their heart and stop this right now. It is just too much, my brother,” the woman told the station, the sound of gunfire popping nearby.Clashes broke out on Sunday, six days after Prime Minister Bruce Golding dropped his opposition to extraditing Coke, who has ties to the governing party. Golding had stalled the case for nine months claiming the United States indictment relied on illegal wiretap evidence, but he caved  in to a growing public outcry over his stand.After the reversal, Coke’s supporters began barricading streets and preparing for battle.West Kingston, which includes the Trenchtown slum where reggae superstar Bob Marley was raised, is the epicentre  of the violence. But yesterday, security forces also came under fire  in areas outside that patchwork of gritty slums in the capital on Jamaica’s southeastern coast,  far from the more peaceful tourist resorts on the north shore.Gunmen shot at police while trying to erect barricades in a poor section of St Catherine parish, which is just outside the two parishes where the government  on Sunday implemented  a month-long state  of emergency.A police station in an outlying area of Kingston also was showered with bullets by a roving band  of gunmen with  high-powered rifles.Security Minister Dwight Nelson said  “police are on top of the situation”, but gunfire was reported in several poor communities and brazen gunmen even shot up Kingston’s central  police station.Coke’s lead attorney, Don Foote, told reporters his legal team had planned to have talks with American officials at the embassy but the meeting was cancelled.Foote refused to say whether Coke was hunkered down in the barricaded Tivoli Gardens slum or was elsewhere  in the country. (AP)