Gunmen from the Jamaat al Muslimeen walked into the Red House, Trinidad and Tobago's parliament building, just after 6 PM on July 27, 1990. They took Prime Minister A.N.R. Robinson and most of his cabinet hostage. Simultaneously, another group seized the Trinidad and Tobago Television station, the country's only broadcast outlet. From the studio, the insurgents' leader, Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, announced the overthrow of the government. For the next 144 hours, the nation watched a coup unfold in real time on its own airwaves.
The attack was not a conventional military putsch. The Jamaat al Muslimeen was a religious group with grievances over land and political recognition. Their arsenal was modest, their planning chaotic. During the assault, they set the parliament building on fire. In the ensuing riots and looting in the capital, Port of Spain, 24 people were killed. The standoff ended not with a military assault but with a negotiated amnesty, brokered by President Noor Hassanali, after the hostages were filmed pleading for their lives. Prime Robinson, shown with a gun to his head, famously told troops, "Attack with full force."
The aftermath was a legal and political morass. The government later invalidated the amnesty, and 114 insurgents were convicted of treason, though their sentences were overturned on appeal. The event exposed deep social fractures in the oil-rich twin-island nation. It demonstrated how a small, determined group could paralyze a democratic state by capturing its symbolic and media centers. The coup attempt failed to change the government, but it permanently altered Trinidad's sense of security.