The over two-year-old investigation into the multimillion dollar heist aboard a Guyana-registered vessel in Curacao has stalled since authorities there cannot find the Guyanese crew.
In November 2012, the Summer Bliss was raided by armed gunmen, moments after it moored in Curacao. They took 476 pounds of gold, which fuelled speculation that the gold might have been smuggled from Guyana.
“The case cannot proceed because the trial judge gave instructions to the investigative judge to get statements from the Guyanese crew and they have all left,” Special Prosecutor Norman Serphos told Stabroek News.
“The trial judge did not give a specific date for the investigative judge to report back to him. So, I don’t know how long this process will take. Can be one week, one month, one year, who knows?” Serphos added.
He explained that the work of the investigative judge is even more difficult as Guyana has no extradition treaty with the Kingdom of Netherlands so the request for assistance from the government here will be based on goodwill.
“This is very, very difficult because Guyana is not like Belgium or any other country that the Kingdom of Netherlands has a treaty with; we have none with your country,” he said.
When contacted recently, a senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs official told Stabroek News that the ministry has not yet received a correspondence of a request from Curacao for assistance in the case.
The Guyana Police Force has said too that it has not been contacted by Dutch authorities.
Stabroek News understands that while the Dutch police have the names of the eight Guyanese crew members and the captain, locating the men will prove to be an exhaustive task. This is because the Curacao authorities believe that the men might not have returned to their native land and since they were never suspects in the heist, fingerprints and other data were not taken.
Police in Curacao have never released the names of the crew members, since they said the investigation was a sensitive one and that the crew were never suspects.
Curacao port authorities have not yet decided on the fate of the vessel.
According to police reports, the robbers went to the port area in three different cars and guards let them inside the restricted area in the mistaken belief that they were customs officials.
News agency Amigoe had reported that six men, carrying guns and wearing masks and hoodies along with the police jackets stormed the ship. At gunpoint, they pushed the 51-year-old captain as well as the three Guyanese crewmen onto the ground.
The perpetrators apparently knew their way around the ship and walked directly to the three metal boxes with the gold bars which had a total weight of 476 pounds and they reportedly took only five minutes to remove them.
The judge presiding over the case, where seven persons—one from Bonaire, three from Venezuela and three from Curacao including a jeweller who had purchased some of the gold—were charged with varying offences, had asked that the crew be questioned further at a hearing last December.
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.
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.
He has maintained that no one had come forward to claim the gold and that there was “nothing new” to report.
