KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Jamaica’s top cop insisted Friday
security forces will capture a reputed underworld boss who escaped
a bloody, four-day assault on his slum stronghold, while more
people in the battle zone said innocents died during the
fighting.

At a news conference in Jamaica’s tense capital, police
Commissioner Owen Ellington said authorities believe Christopher
“Dudus” Coke, wanted by the U.S. on drugs and gun trafficking
charges, is hiding somewhere on this tropical island of 2.6 million
inhabitants.

“We will catch him, we will execute that warrant, and he will
face justice,” Ellington told reporters. He said the “best
intelligence we have” indicates Coke remains in Jamaica.

Officials previously said Coke might have escaped Jamaica before
thousands of soldiers and police invaded the Tivoli Gardens slum
Monday in an effort to arrest him for extradition to New York.

Police say their offensive was launched after coordinated
attacks by gangsters who shot up 14 police stations, burning two to
the ground with molotov cocktails, in an effort to protect the
41-year-old Coke from extradition. So far, 70 civilians and three
security officers are listed by the government as killed during the
fighting

U.S. authorities say Coke has been trafficking cocaine to the
streets of New York City since the mid-1990s.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a U.S. law enforcement
official in New York said a lawyer for Coke has been in
negotiations with the U.S. Justice Department about his client’s
possible safe removal to New York to face charges.

Coke is said to fear suffering the same fate as his father, a
gang leader known as Jim Brown, who died in a prison fire in 1992
while awaiting extradition to the U.S. on drug charges.

It was unclear if arrangements to surrender had been made.
Coke’s lead attorney, Don Foote, did not return phone messages
seeking comment on the report.

People in the gritty slums of the capital have made numerous
allegations that police and soldiers sprayed bullets wildly when
they stormed neighborhoods that had been barricaded by Coke’s
loyalists in West Kingston, where reggae music was born.

In an overgrown area of a cemetery across from the still-restive
slum of Denham Town, the stench of decaying bodies hung in the air
Friday. At least 11 roughhewn wooden coffins contained corpses,
parts of their bodies exposed to buzzing black flies.

Ellington said 15 “badly decomposed” bodies of civilians shot
during the security offensive were taken to the May Pen cemetery by
overwhelmed undertakers at local funeral homes.

“The undertakers told us they could not take them into storage,”
Ellington said, stressing that photographs of the dead would be
posted in the restive slums so relatives can identify missing
relatives. He said police had “no interest whatsoever to bury
bodies in secret.”

Numerous local people said they were convinced many more slum
dwellers were killed than authorities have reported.

One Tivoli Gardens woman told Associated Press reporters that
she and her two children hid in their apartment as soldiers and
police swarmed the complex Tuesday, shouting for everyone to come
out into the open. When the family ignored the warning, she said, a
soldier shot through the locked door, and the fragmented bullet hit
her left leg.

“There are innocent people that were dying,” said the
49-year-old woman, showing her wound as she recovered at a
relative’s house outside Kingston. “They fire the shot that hit me
through the door! They didn’t know if there was a child right
there. I’m afraid of them right now, I’m afraid of them.”

The police commissioner said Friday that two women had been
killed in the Tivoli Gardens fighting, but the tally could not be
independently confirmed. He said everyone else killed during the
raid were men. He also said several gunmen “were dressed as
females” seeking to avoid getting shot.

“We have heard allegations of misconduct. We are determined to
investigate every one of them,” Ellington told reporters at a
Jamaican army base, where a military commander also vowed to take
action if there were extrajudicial killings.

Information Minister Daryl Vaz has said the government would
conduct an independent investigation into police actions during the
raid. He said Golding’s government was “very concerned” about
allegations of deliberate killings at Coke’s stronghold by security
forces, which have long had a reputation for being indiscriminate
with their weapons.

On Friday, police showed evidence of homemade bombs they said
were found at Tivoli Gardens, some attached to barricades of
concertina wire and trashed cars. Security officials said they had
recovered about two dozen firearms and some 7,000 rounds of
ammunition. They said Coke’s defenders “may have received help from
foreign sources,” but didn’t say who that might have been.