1987 election security

I read Brigadier Maurice Calleja's contribution (January 25) describing the counting process for the 1987 election as smooth and uneventful. I also heard accounts from Nationalist candidates and their counting agents and I came to the conclusion that they were on two different planets at that time.

With regard to the orders not to let unauthorised persons approach the counting compound, Brigadier Calleja expects readers to be so naïve as not to know that the danger was within the compound and not outside, as all security personnel especially those of the Task Force were hand-picked for their party loyalty and security officials had little or no control over them.

In his memoirs The Politics of Persuasion, Guido De Marco wrote that when he became minister for the police there were not more than 100 policemen whom he could rely upon and these had lost the will to stand their ground in their duties.

Perhaps the Brigadier could inform us of the number of soldiers.