Trinidad acid bath victim gets $1m award

(Trinidad Guardian) A 61-year-old man, who was left per­ma­nent­ly scarred af­ter doused with acid by his sis­ter-in-law, has fi­nal­ly re­ceived com­pen­sa­tion af­ter an al­most two-decade-long le­gal bat­tle.

On Jan­u­ary 31, High Court Mas­ter Martha Alexan­der or­dered more than $1 mil­lion com­pen­sa­tion for Raf­fick Mo­hammed, of Walk­er Street, Ca­roni, at the end of his pro­tract­ed pri­vate as­sault and bat­tery claim against Myra Bhag­wans­ingh.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view yesterday, Mo­hammed said he was pleased with the out­come. “Mon­ey can’t com­pen­sate for this but I can help a lit­tle,” he said.

How­ev­er, he stat­ed that he was dis­ap­point­ed by the slow pace of the jus­tice sys­tem.  “Jus­tice is like that in Trinidad. Imag­ine when this hap­pened, my son was one-year-old, now he has a one-year-old son him­self,” Mo­hammed said.

In as­sess­ing the com­pen­sa­tion, Alexan­der analysed the ex­ten­sive in­juries he sus­tained in 1991 and the dozen pro­ce­dures and op­er­a­tions he had to un­der­go to help re­pair the dam­age.

Alexan­der not­ed that Mo­hammed suf­fered acid burns to 16 per cent of his body in the at­tack. His face was left dis­fig­ured. Skin had to be har­vest­ed from his groin and thighs for skin grafts.

In ad­di­tion to the phys­i­cal in­juries, Mo­hammed al­so claimed to have suf­fered de­pres­sion.