–as part of probe into phantom murders
Commissioner of Police Henry Greene yesterday said the force hopes to speak to Selwyn Vaughn, the US star witness, as well as confessed drug trafficker Roger Khan as it investigates the murders allegedly committed by Khan’s phantom group.
“We also hope … to interview them because that is very, very important for our final [investigation],” Greene, who was crime chief during most of the years Khan operated his drug enterprise, told reporters yesterday.
Greene did not go into details about the hoped for discussions with Vaughn and Khan but said he has written to US Embassy officials in Guyana making that request. He also said he is awaiting a response from the embassy officials to the second letter he wrote following Khan’s 15-year sentence two Fridays ago requesting information on Khan’s activities in Guyana.
Greene continues to make requests to the embassy when there is an established protocol under the Inter-American Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters — a multilateral treaty which both Guyana and the US are party to and through which states can request information from each other on criminal matters. While Guyana has said its Ministry of Home Affairs is the ministry to make such requests under the Organisation of American States (OAS) treaty, the US has designated its Office of International Affairs of the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice as the authority to contact.
It is not clear why Guyana is not following this route as it attempts to gather information from the US and observers have pointed out that this may be the reason the US authorities have been slow in assisting Guyana with its request.
Vaughn, who was the main witness in the witness tampering trial of Khan’s former lawyers – Robert Simels and Arianne Irving – said he was part of Khan’s murderous ‘Phantom gang’. He had riveted a New York court with his evidence as he spoke about Khan’s activities in Guyana and also about the plot between Khan and his lawyers to eliminate potential witnesses in Khan’s drug case.
The main witness targeted was former Guyana Defence Force (GDF) officer David Clarke, who is sitting in a US jail on drug charges. He was once head of a GDF camp set up in Buxton to quell the criminal gang in that village. Prior to his guilty plea Khan had accused Clarke of working in cahoots with the criminals in Buxton.
Vaughn also spoke about government links with Khan and had implicated Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy as being the government official who authorised the importation of the now infamous spy equipment to Guyana, a claim the minister has denied.
Lists
More than a week after the force announced that it has set up a special unit, headed by Crime Chief Seelall Persaud, to investigate the murders allegedly committed by Khan and Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins’ gang Greene yesterday said that apart from lists of murdered persons submitted by the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) and Chairman of the Alliance For Change Khemraj Ramjattan there has been no further public response to the investigation.
Greene and Persaud, who were both in senior positions in the force during the years Khan operated his drug enterprise, yesterday called for information on the 200 murders Khan has been accused of. They said that the lists submitted have murders from way back in 1992 but they want the murders that Khan has been accused of committing.
Persaud said that no member of the public has approached them with information but that his ranks are out in the fields conducting investigations and they are also compiling data from newspaper reports.
Meanwhile, Greene called on the PNCR to produce the documents and recording it spoke about following the announcement of the investigation.
“The public is aware that sworn affidavits and taped interviews of potential witnesses were presented to the police by the PNCR several years ago which could have facilitated an investigation,” the PNCR had charged in a release following the announcement and it questioned what the force did with the information.
The US investigators had linked Khan to the murders of boxing coach Donald Allison, Dave Persaud, who was murdered outside of the then Palm Court and activist/television talk show host Ronald Waddell. Persaud said the police had investigated those murders but they have reopened the cases.
“Those matters were investigated we are now pulling them… working cold case,” he told Stabroek News.
“We are making the effort, there are cold cases that we have to go back over as information comes in,” he added.
Questioned again about whether his investigators would question persons who were close to Khan, most of them former policemen, Persaud said: “I am saying we are at the stage of collecting information, when we get information only then we can know what is required.”
Khan had operated a drug trafficking enterprise here for more than eight years, US prosecutors said, and he headed the violent ‘Phantom Squad’ that was responsible for many deaths. Khan had publicly said that he worked with the security forces to stem the crime wave following the 2002 prison break.
Khan was charged with and pleaded guilty to conspiring to import cocaine into the US over a five-year period from January 2001 to March 2006. The US government had said 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.
