The Guyanese crew of the vessel from which over US$11 million of gold was spectacularly carted off by thieves last year November in Curacao has been ordered to once again answer questions on the robbery.
“The case has been set to a new date to accommodate further investigations…what I do know is that the judge has ordered that the Guyanese who were on the ship be re- questioned and this was relayed to the Public Prosecutor’s Office,” Prosecutor Norman Serphos told Stabroek News on Tuesday from Curacao.
The Judge presiding over the case where seven persons, one from Bonaire, three from Venezuela and three from Curacao which included a jeweller who had purchased some of the gold, where charged with varying offences, handed down the decision at the last court hearing for the men.
Attorneys for the Curacao locals had maintained that they too were not privy to any details about the crew of the vessel, and that the men are pivotal in not only revealing the origin of the gold but the identity of the thieves who stole the bars.
Police on the Dutch island would not release the names of the crew members, since they said the investigation was a sensitive one and that the crewmen were never suspects and could leave the island.
Sephros on Tuesday once again stressed that his office was looking solely at robbery and that they were not undertaking investigations to determine the gold’s origin. “We are not and would not be investigating the origin of the gold,” he said.
However, while not saying if his country has asked Guyana for help in the investigation he said that they were soliciting “help from abroad with the investigations,”
From the inception, observers had pointed out that the crew members were pivotal to the investigation into the origin of the gold but the government here seemed uninterested in gaining access to them. The boat was last seen in Guyana’s waters prior to the heist.
Although a team was sent to the Dutch island by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) to conduct investigations into whether the gold originated from Guyana, no new information was forthcoming from that visit.
On January 24, 2013 Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment, Robert Persaud told Stabroek News that the report of the GGMC officers provided no new insight and that the team was not able to find the Guyanese crew members. The matter was now in the hands of local law enforcement authorities, he said. Persaud had said that determining the origin of the gold was a herculean task for his ministry as no one had come forward to claim the gold.
Efforts to contact him on Tuesday for comment proved futile.
However an official from the Ministry of Natural Resources told Stabroek News that the ministry was no longer interested in the case.
Local police here also opined that the case from the Guyana end has gone cold as no one has to date asked them for help. “Today is what, more than a year? Nobody ever come and say we need help cracking this gold story …we can’t go ahead and give help when it was not requested of us …where would we begin?” a senior police said on Tuesday.
There had been speculation that the gold might have been taken from Guyana to Suriname and mixed with the precious metal from that country and then exported purportedly as having originated from Suriname. But Suriname officials have on a number of occasions stated that they were not interested in the investigations as no one from that country had claimed the gold was theirs.
A Surinamese police official this year told this newspaper that as far as they were concerned the case is closed from their end. He said that the issue of gold smuggling was not one that his country has an issue with since their taxes and royalties were very low.
As for the vessel it is still docked on the island and will likely be auctioned after the court case has concluded.
