Four of the five persons selected to sit on the Commissioner of Inquiry (COI) into the July 18 protestor shootings at Linden will be sworn in today at the Office of the President (OP), where the details of their work will be announced, Attorney General Anil Nandlall said last evening.
Nandlall told Stabroek News that Justice Lensley Wolfe and Senior Counsel K.D. Knight of Jamaica, Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal of Trinidad and Tobago along with former Justice of Appeal Claudette Singh will be sworn in at 10 am today. The fifth commissioner, former Chancellor of the Judiciary Cecil Kennard, who is out of the country, will be sworn in at a later date, Nandlall said.
Asked how soon after the swearing in their work will begin, Nandlall said that question would be answered at the ceremony.
When contacted earlier yesterday, a senior Government official said it is “assumed they would start some work tomorrow [today].”
Region Ten Chairman Sharma Solomon, in a brief telephone interview with this newspaper, said that he does not know if the commissioners are expected in the country today since all arrangements for this are with OP and his office has not been informed. He said that the furthest they have gotten is the setting of the Terms of Reference of the inquiry.
Meanwhile, APNU’s Dr Rupert Roopnaraine said that even if the commissioners are sworn in today, he does not think they would commence work right away. Instead, he expected that there would be a “debriefing.” He said he would have expected that they would have had a preliminary meeting with all the major stakeholders but up to late yesterday afternoon he was not informed about their agenda.
“But this visit may be a familiarisation visit,” he said, suggesting that Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon be contacted for details. However, calls to Dr Luncheon’s phone went unanswered.
On July 18, three men, Ron Sommerset, Allan Wilson and Shemroy Bouyea, were killed and at least 20 other persons were injured near the Wismar/Mackenzie Bridge after police opened fire on residents demonstrating against increased electricity tariffs, which took effect at the start of that month. The actions of the police, who said that ranks were provoked, have been condemned because of the failure to use non-lethal measures and there have been calls for murder charges to be laid against the officers who gave the orders to fire.
Post-mortem examinations on the trio had revealed that they were shot with live rounds as well as shotgun pellets.
The shooting resulted in the protest action intensifying. Following calls for the establishment of a COI with an international component, President Donald Ramotar had given August 2 as the deadline for the Terms of Reference to be completed.
On that day, there was a parliamentary sitting and the forum was used to announce the TOR, which was not well received by the AFC, which said that it was not a party to the agreement. Discussions on the TOR were later reopened so that the party could have an input.
The COI will be based in Georgetown; the location is yet to be released and the commissioners would be travelling to Linden as needs be. The Region had been insisting that the COI should be based in the mining town as the shootings occurred there.
The COI is expected to last between six to eight weeks and all of the commissioners are expected to remain in the jurisdiction until it is completed.
Based on the information from government sources, the COI should begin sometime next week.
