PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – The results of the secondary schools entrance examination sat by primary school students in May have been posted on the secret-spilling Wikileaks website a day ahead of their official release today, prompting a police investigation, education officials here said.
Education Minister Tim Gopeesingh told reporters his permanent secretary was contacting Police Commissioner Dwayne Gibbs to begin a full-scale criminal investigation into the leak.
“Active investigations are being pursued to determine those responsible for this act of sabotage and for possible prosecution of criminal conduct,” the Ministry of Education said in a statement.
The results, which list the name, sex and secondary school assigned to each of the 19,900 primary school students who sat the examination. The results were published online on the education ministry’s website on Thursday morning.
Primary school principals were presenting the results mid-morning to the pupils at their schools while parents who registered with the ministry via text message were receiving the news on their mobile phones. The results for all students were available for downloading from the ministry website.
Gopeesingh said it was a criminal offence to premature release the results on Wednesday, promising the offender would “be made to feel the full brunt of the law”.
Wikileaks allows for users to post official documents themselves.
The education minister suggested the leak was designed to create “chaos and confusion”.
“There are agents inside and outside of the Ministry, intent and determined to create instability, confusion and chaos in the minds of the population as well as the students, parents and teachers of our nation,” the ministry said in the statement.
It continued: “The Ministry is well aware of these insidious acts being committed over the past few weeks with the same nefarious intent and purpose. The Ministry of Education advises the public to ignore any such e-mail or information, as their contents may be false or inaccurate,”
Gopeesingh said the leak is the second such incident this year at the education ministry, adding that a potential breach in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exam – the general and technical proficiency testing of high school students – had been “nipped in the bud”.
