Confessed Guyanese drug trafficker Roger Khan will learn his fate at a sentence hearing scheduled for November 6, months after he pleaded guilty to charges against him that included drug trafficking and witness tampering.
The date for sentencing by Judge Dora Irizarry was recently announced in the US court where Khan also pleaded guilty to a gun running charge in March this year. It has been indicated that Khan’s presentence report has been completed.
The announcement for Khan’s sentencing comes even as his former attorney Robert Simels is currently on trial on a witness tampering charge. Khan’s guilty plea had come less than two weeks before the scheduled start of his trial on the drug charges, for which he could have been sentenced to life in prison.
In a letter to the presiding judges in the New York courts in March, US State Attorney Benton Campbell indicated that the prosecution and the defence had come to an agreement for Khan to receive a 15-year sentence when he pleads guilty to all charges.
Campbell indicated the agreement in the event that the judges considered consolidating all three matters for Khan to plead guilty in one court.
Khan is charged with conspiring to import cocaine into the US over a five-year period, from January 2001 to March 2006. The US government said that he was the leader of a cocaine trafficking organisation based in Georgetown.
It also asserted that he was able to import huge amounts of cocaine into Guyana, and then oversee exportation to the US and elsewhere. The US government had charged that a significant amount of the cocaine distributed by Khan went to the Eastern District of New York for further distribution. As an example, it cited a Guyanese drug trafficking organisation based in Queens, New York, which it said was supplied by Khan. The Queens organisation was said to have distributed hundreds of kilos of cocaine in a two-month period during the spring of 2003.
Khan was captured in 2006 when he fled to neighbouring Suriname after local police went after him. He was nabbed during a cocaine bust along with his bodyguards and thrown into jail in that country. He was later arrested in Trinidad while en route to Guyana, and taken to the US where he has been in jail since.
Prior to fleeing to Suriname and in response to police searches of his various properties and a wanted bulletin being issued for him, Khan had placed newspaper advertisements in the press stating that he was involved in crime fighting in Guyana and had worked closely with local and US law enforcement officials.