MARK BAS­SANT

At least 75 peo­ple were mo­men­tar­i­ly de­tained by po­lice of­fi­cers of the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team (SORT) and of­fi­cers of the West­ern Di­vi­sion Task Force, af­ter of­fi­cers swooped down on the pop­u­lar Res­i­dence night­club in One Wood­brook place just be­fore mid­night on Sun­day.

Se­nior in­ves­ti­ga­tors told Guardian Me­dia that po­lice gained en­try in­to the night­club by break­ing the chain lock to the door of the base­ment en­trance just af­ter 11:35 p.m.

The op­er­a­tions were spear­head­ed by Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent Thomp­son, along with ASP Hen­ry and SORT.

Guardian Me­dia ar­rived on the scene short­ly af­ter and went through the base­ment en­trance to lat­er see a man ly­ing on the ground on his stom­ach, hand­cuffed, with two po­lice of­fi­cers stand­ing guard.

Sources say that sev­er­al of the pa­trons who were at­tend­ing a pri­vate func­tion were not wear­ing masks and were lat­er tick­et­ed and re­leased by the po­lice.  Se­nior po­lice sources in­formed Guardian Me­dia that the chil­dren of promi­nent busi­ness­peo­ple who were at the event were al­lowed to leave.

Sev­er­al pa­trons who were caught off guard were lat­er made to sit on the dance floor for more than three hours as po­lice scoured their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards.  Two snif­fer dogs al­so were brought in to search for any il­le­gal nar­cotics amongst the de­tained per­sons.

The po­lice al­so had brought a mo­bile de­ten­tion unit bus in the event that they had to ar­rest any­one and take them to the po­lice sta­tion.  How­ev­er, po­lice said that was not nec­es­sary af­ter those per­sons who were tick­et­ed were al­lowed to leave the premis­es.

A con­cerned par­ent who ar­rived on the scene short­ly af­ter 2 am said his daugh­ter was one of the per­sons de­tained in­side.

He said she lat­er spoke to him and told him that he could leave since she was not go­ing to be ar­rest­ed and she would be giv­en a ride home by a friend who was al­so in­side the club.

One of the man­age­ment team at the night­club who spoke with Guardian Me­dia this morn­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, said no one had been ar­rest­ed con­trary to oth­er me­dia re­ports.

The man­age­ment per­son­nel said that po­lice had giv­en them a stern warn­ing about hav­ing any events af­ter the 10 pm cut off time.

Some oth­er mem­bers of the man­age­ment team who were at the club, along with some staff mem­bers, were de­tained by po­lice for ques­tion­ing but were ex­pect­ed to be re­leased lat­er in the day.