THE crowd which walked with Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley on Tuesday from Woodford Square to President's House numbered no more than 3,000 people at its peak, claims National Security Minister Jack Warner.

Warner made the statement yesterday as he disputed figures that the crowd that joined Rowley numbered more than 10,000.

Rowley led the march to hand-deliver a petition to President's House over the Section 34 fiasco.

The petition, which Rowley claimed contained more than 25,000 signatures, called on President George Maxwell Richards to demand an explanation from Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar as to why the controversial Section 34 was prematurely proclaimed to become law.

Richards is out of the country and Senate President Timothy Hamel-Smith is acting in his absence.

Hamel-Smith accepted the petition from Rowley.

Police estimated that the crowd that walked with Rowley numbered between 10,000 and 15,000.

Warner said an "aerial view" of the crowd, however, showed that the figures were "grossly overestimated".

But Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly Orville London said the size of the crowd was never the issue.

London was among those who presented the petition in a closed-door meeting with Hamel-Smith at President's House, St Ann's.

"I am not concerned with the arithmetic of the process, I am concerned with the politics and I am concerned with the social aspect of the process, so if ten people came out I would have been quite content to know that we sent a signal that there are at least ten people in this country who are not prepared to take the foolishness," London said yesterday.

"And the ten will become a thousand and the thousand will be become ten thousand so the arithmetic of this process as far as I am concerned is not the important thing. The important thing is that there are people in this country who feel sufficiently aggrieved and they are prepared to march in the sun to send a signal and I am certain their example will be followed by tens of thousands more," he added.