Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee yesterday said that government is still awaiting the forensic analysis of samples taken from suspected victims of the Lindo Creek massacre, where eight miners were killed in June 2008.
“I have to report that so far as of today’s date, we have not received the information that was promised by the Jamaican delegation,” Rohee told at a press briefing.
The Home Affairs Ministry had announced last month that the Jamaica Constabulary Force had told the government that it would provide a full report by the end of lasts month on the DNA analysis of the samples.
Local police are in touch with their counterparts in Jamaica, Rohee said yesterday, adding that they have been given all assurances that the results will soon be delivered.
Almost four years later the murders at Lindo Creek, Upper Berbice River, remain unsolved. Those believed killed and then burnt were Dax Arokium, Cecil Arokium, Clifton Wong, Nigel Torres, Compton Speirs, Bonny Harry, Horace Drakes and Lancelot Lee, who were at the Arokium mining camp at Lindo Creek. The remains, including feet, bones and skulls, recovered from the camp were unidentifiable.
There had been strong views expressed that corrupt elements of the security forces might have been responsible for the murders in a grab for gold, while the police have blamed a gang headed by the now dead fugitive Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins.
Rohee yesterday downplayed the money that the government was paying to keep the remains at Lyken’s Funeral Parlour and suggested that a certain section of the media was trying to stir up controversy.
“These remains are very important to the families. The integrity of the remains is critical also to any further analysis that is to be required and if it costs a million dollars a day to keep them, we have to do that because let’s imagine we weren’t doing that and these remains were just left stored in a box where rats and cockroaches…I think we would have been worse off. We would have been accused of being delinquent and so many other things,” he said.
The Special Anti-Crime Unit of Trinidad and Tobago and Major Investigation Task Force of the Jamaica Constabulary Force assisted local police in processing the crime scene at Lindo Creek and advised that the identification of the persons murdered could only have been determined via DNA analysis. As a result, samples of the human remains recovered were taken by the Jamaican Team to the Jamaican Forensic Laboratory for analysis, while, the remainder was stored at Lyken’s Funeral Parlour.
The Home Ministry has said that it is usual for remains of deceased persons in murder investigations to be disposed of after a post-mortem examination is concluded by handing over the body to relatives of the deceased for funeral.
However, it was pointed out that in the Lindo Creek case, which is an exceptional one, the remains were not identified and therefore could not have been handed over to anyone nor disposed.
Meanwhile, Rohee also addressed the Sheema Mangar murder investigation yesterday, saying that there have been no new developments in the case.
Earlier this month, the police had disclosed that a hair sample in the case, which was to be taken to Barbados for testing in October 2010, was left behind by a policeman. It was eventually dispatched to Bridgetown in August last year and the results are still to be received.
In a widely publicized case, Mangar was run over by a car in September 2010 driven by the man who stole her cell phone and she later died. A suspect was arrested but released and police are still to lay a charge in the matter.
Mangar’s family, meanwhile, has repeatedly expressed frustration at the pace of the probe and the failure to bring her killer to justice.
