Rel­a­tives of miss­ing fish­er­man Chad Joseph are dis­put­ing claims by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie and For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Sean Sobers that no Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­al was killed dur­ing a re­cent US op­er­a­tion in Caribbean wa­ters.In a Fi­nan­cial Times re­port on No­vem­ber 13, Je­re­mie stat­ed that no lo­cal fish­er­man had been killed. Sobers lat­er re­peat­ed this po­si­tion at a me­dia con­fer­ence.But Joseph’s fam­i­ly in­sists they have heard noth­ing to con­firm he is alive.Dur­ing a vis­it to the fam­i­ly’s Las Cuevas Vil­lage home, Joseph’s grand­moth­er, Chris­tine Clement, dis­missed the min­is­ters’ state­ments. She said the fam­i­ly con­tin­ues to hope, but ev­i­dence sug­gests oth­er­wise.“No­body ever came and told us any­thing. I wish they were alive. We are pray­ing every day that they are alive,” Clement said. “But if he was alive or in cus­tody some­where, he would have reached out to us by now.”Yes­ter­day marked 40 days since the fam­i­ly be­lieves Joseph, 26, died. Rel­a­tives held a memo­r­i­al ser­vice in his ho­n­our. They be­lieve he was killed in an at­tack on a ves­sel off Venezuela on Oc­to­ber 16. Joseph had re­port­ed­ly been strand­ed in Venezuela for sev­er­al months be­fore the in­ci­dent.An­oth­er fish­er­man, Rishi Sama­roo, is al­so be­lieved to have died in the same op­er­a­tion, which US au­thor­i­ties de­scribed as part of ef­forts to com­bat nar­co-traf­fick­ing.Asked whether she ac­cept­ed the gov­ern­ment’s po­si­tion, Clement replied, “I don’t know what to say about that. I would be glad to know if it’s so. But I say if any­thing, he would have got­ten in con­tact with his moth­er.”Both fam­i­lies filed miss­ing per­sons re­ports on the ad­vice of gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials.