Relatives of Edwin Niles, the prisoner who succumbed to a clot in his lungs as a result of burns during an altercation with prison officers, are questioning the silence of the police on investigations and are insisting that something needs to be said very soon.
Police have so far released no details on investigations or findings into the man’s death.
Niles was reportedly dealt a thrashing at the hands of the prison officials after he was found with seven live .22 rounds in the pockets of his pants after returning from a day of labour at army base Camp Ayanganna on July 2. It was during interrogation about where he got the rounds that he was beaten with a rubber hose and then burnt with a hot liquid. Niles had gotten the pants from a room at Camp Ayanganna which he had cleaned.
However now that he has been laid to rest, the man’s family is still grieving about the circumstances which surround his death, his mother Brenda Nurse told this newspaper yesterday.
With regard to police investigations, Nurse said she and her daughter visited the Alberttown Police Station last Thursday since her daughter had to give a statement to police. The woman said at that time she was informed that investigators were wrapping up investigations.
“But I want to know how long it will take them to get their findings … I am eager to know. The prison administration has also been very quiet but I need to be told something good,” Nurse said.
The woman told Stabroek News in a brief interview yesterday that she was more than aggrieved, “not only at his death but it’s the way in which he died.” She said she wanted to know when she would get satisfaction from the details of an investigation and lamented, ”I am not hearing from them and I want to know how long it would really take.” Nurse said she has been extremely quiet throughout the whole ordeal which she and her family was forced to live with and she feels too that she has taken her time to speak with everyone.
“But I want them to answer this question of how long it will really take before I hear from them. I need for them to come out and say something. They need to tell me and my children something,” she reiterated.
Asked whether she had heard from the administration of the prison since, the woman said her last contact was when she had to collect her son’s death certificate, but since then she has not been contacted by them.
The woman insisted that, “I lost my son under Mr. Erskine’s watch and they must say something to us. I am not giving up.”
Many organizations have come out in condemnation of the way the man died and have called for a thorough investigation. Opposition leader and leader of the People’s National Congress Reform, Robert Corbin has since written Acting Police Commissioner Henry Greene urging that the man’s death be treated as murder while in custody of the prison authorities and at best death under mysterious circumstances which require investigations.
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has also called for an impartial and vigorous investigation into the death of the prisoner and urged that the matter not be treated as exempt from the normal processes of the law because the disciplined services are involved.
“Charges appropriate to the severity of the crime should be laid promptly, if only to quell the rapid disintegration of official credibility on these issues,” the GHRA had said in a statement last week.
The human rights body had said too that Niles’ death reinforces the suspicion that these services are “encouraged to get results at any cost when arms and ammunition are involved.”