Contender for the leadership of the PNCR, Dr Richard Van West-Charles says the link between drug smuggler Roger Khan and the present administration is “emerging with great clarity.”
And yesterday Van West-Charles, a son-in-law of the late PNC founder leader Forbes Burnham, in a statement called on the Guyanese people to demand an investigation into what he referred to as “the criminal activities of Roger Khan and the role played by the Jagdeo administration in his nefarious activities.”
“The fact that there is evidence in abundance that Khan was working in cahoots” with the administration,” Van West-Charles charged, “must mean that that administration has been tainted with participation in narco-activities and a criminal enterprise.”
The latest piece in the puzzle are the details of e-mails published in the June 1 issue of the Stabroek News and which originated with Khan’s former lawyer, Robert Simels, Van West-Charles, a former senior health minister during the PNC administration, said.
He noted too that in an e-mail Simels had asserted that the “spy computer” which Khan used to record top officials in Guyana, including former Commissioner of Police Winston Felix, was purchased “on the authority of the Guyana Government.” The government has repeatedly denied having anything to do with the importation of the equipment or with Khan.
The assertion by Simels, Van West-Charles contended, “is consistent with the view long held by the average Guyanese that only a government could purchase such equipment and that someone in the Jagdeo administration had authorized or facilitated such purchase.”
Indeed, the statement observed, Simels went on to claim that Peter Meyers, a representative of the company which sold the spy equipment to the Government of Guyana, according to the Stabroek News of June 1st 2009, “had been in contact with a Guyana Government Minister.”
Van West-Charles further argued that it does not take a great deal of imagination to understand why a Minister in the Jagdeo administration might be in contact with the company which sold the “spy computer” to Roger Khan.
However, Van West-Charles, who has taken early retirement from PAHO/WHO where he had been working for the past 19 years, pointed out that Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy whose name appears in the emails from Robert Simels has denied any knowledge of assisting the government in training Khan to operate the spy equipment.
It must be noted, he added, that this was a rather elaborate exercise which seems to have involved a significant amount of planning and coordination.
According to Van West-Charles, it appears that the administration here not only facilitated the purchase of the “spy computer” but also apparently arranged for Khan to be trained in its use. And Guyanese would be stunned to know that the cost for such training was US$90,000, he added.
He reasoned further that it is not a convincing argument that a single individual could have undertaken an exercise of this magnitude without the aid and protection of the Guyana government.
No amount of ‘spin’ and repeated denials, he declared, can now convince the average Guyanese that the government was not involved with Roger Khan, Van West-Charles asserted. Moreover, he said, it is equally clear that Khan was assisted by the government in so-called crime fighting activities.
Van West-Charles, who has signaled his intent to seek the leadership of the main opposition PNCR, cited Khan’s paid advertisement in 2006 which asserted that “during the crime spree in 2002, I worked closely with the crime fighting sections of the Guyana Police Force and provided them with assistance and information at my own expense. My participation was instrumental in curbing crime during this period.”
If one follows the Roger Khan saga carefully, Van West-Charles continued, “one cannot help but observe how carefully this administration sought to protect Khan from the law enforcement authorities, going so far as to engineer the ouster of the former Commissioner of Police, Mr. Winston Felix, who had taken bold action to bring Khan’s criminal activities to an end.” Felix went into retirement after he reached the age of 55 and was not kept on. However, the present Commissioner, Henry Greene has reached the age of retirement but is being allowed to stay on.
“Previous to this,” Van West-Charles said, “when Khan was arrested on December 4th, 2002 by ranks of the Military Central Intelligence Division (MCID) along with his … colleagues and the spy equipment seized, the army was forced to hand over the equipment to the police, which for months could not tell this nation what had happened to it.”
Meanwhile, Van West-Charles observed that Commissioner of Police Greene had recently said that the police was in possession of the “spy computer” but the various statements made by the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in the courts of the United States “make a mockery of such claims.”
Van West-Charles, who recently indicated that being a presidential candidate was not off limits for him, recalled that Roger Khan was fingered as a drug trafficker by the US International Narcotics Control Strategy Report of 2006 which had named him as a “well known drug trafficker.”
