Three remand prisoners implicated in an alleged escape plot at the New Amsterdam Prison on November 15, 2008 were yesterday further remanded to prison by Magistrate Chandra Sohan in the New Amsterdam Court.
A fourth man, Lindon Flavios, is currently serving a five-year sentence at Mazaruni Prison for a similar offence.
The trio, Samuel Fraser, Karim Charles and Rocky Proffit, who were all unrepresented, were not required to plead to charges that while being remand prisoners they escaped from lawful custody.
The men are also jointly charged with violently breaking out from the New Amsterdam Prison with intent to set themselves at liberty.
But Proffit, the most vocal of the group, questioned the court about the circumstances in which he was charged, stating that he was in the ‘solitary’ at the time of the incident.
The remand prisoner told the magistrate that he has been in prison on an attempted murder charge since 2006, and he and the others were placed among persons with tuberculosis. ”Sir, you know, that is an airborne disease,” he argued. He denied, however, that they had escaped.
Meanwhile Charles, for whom the Director of Public Prosecutions had entered a nolle prosequi (dropping prosecution) in a case of robbery with violence at the Berbice Assizes last January, raising his voice stated that the cell in which he was confined had three padlocks making it impossible for him to break out.
The other defendant, Fraser, who was recently freed of fatally shooting 27-year-old Liverpool butcher Gangaram Busjit, said the allegation was new to him as he was never told of it although he was in prison at that time.
Police alleged that the men aided by a relative, who concealed a hacksaw blade in footwear, had sawn out iron bars from their cell and escaped. They were quickly recaptured by prison officers who were on duty in an adjoining cultivation plot.
The men are expected to return to court on October 30.
