Four men were yesterday remanded to prison after being charged with the murder of businessman Mohamed Haniff, who succumbed in hospital a week ago after he was brutalised during a home invasion at Bath, on the West Coast of Berbice.
The accused are Sarjoo Matadin, 56, a cash crop farmer of Bath; Royston Dowden, 29, a labourer of Waterloo, Bath; Devon McCalmon, 50, a weeder and drainage cleaner, of Number 22 Village and Ivan Lindo, 21, a weeder and security guard of Waterloo, Bath. They appeared before Magistrate Rabindranauth Singh at the Fort Wellington Magistrate’s Court, where the joint charge was read to them.
The charge states that at Experiment, Bath, West Coast Berbice, they murdered Mohamed Haniff, also known as ‘Raymond.’
The four men were not required to enter a plea.
Attorney Bernard Da Silva, who represented Matadin, the number one accused, told the magis-trate that his client was held in police custody beyond the maximum 72-hour period he could be held without charge and was not informed whether police had obtained an extension to do so.
Additionally, Da Silva made an application for a medical examination to be done of his client, since he claimed that he was informed that Matadin was assaulted while in police custody at both New Amsterdam and Eve Leary, and was still experiencing pain about his body as a result.
Magistrate Singh granted the application and then remanded the men to prison.
Inspector Phillip Sheriff, informed the court that the case file was incomplete since the prosecution was still awaiting the post-mortem report. However, when questioned by Magistrate Singh he confirmed that they have already obtained the necessary statements from the witnesses.
They four accused will return to court on October 2nd for a report and disclosure.
Haniff, also known as ‘Raymond,’ 47, of Lot 56 Experiment, Bath Settle-ment, West Coast Berbice, was beaten with an iron bar and chopped multiple times in his head with a cutlass in the late hours of last Friday.
He was rushed to the Fort Wellington Hospital, after which he was transferred to the New Amsterdam Public Hospital, where he died just around 1.30 am last Saturday morning.
A post-mortem exami-nation showed that Haniff died as a result of multiple incised wounds to the head.
Also, a police source had previously told this newspaper that Haniff was apparently given sleeping pills. As a result, the police have obtained the contents of his stomach and blood samples for testing.
Initially, Haniff’s wife, 44, was first arrested last Saturday morning after investigators noticed holes in the statement which she provided. However, she has since been released on station bail.
Haniff, who was work-ing in St Martin with a relative in the air conditioning business, returned just seven days before the attack.
Stabroek News was previously told, that the man returned with US $8,000, which he hid in a black purse under his bed after he had noticed some men acting suspicious in front of his house.
The couple’s daughter, Bibi Zarifa Haniff, 25, had told this publication that she resides just next to her parents. “I heard noise coming from them house and then I heard noise on the dam”, on the night her father was murdered.
However, she said, it was only until later that she was informed that bandits had allegedly pounced on her father. “My mother tell me how she did waiting for my brother to come from work so she didn’t bolt the door, she just push it in and they went upstairs when the three bandits come in,” she explained.
The police on Monday confirmed that one of the suspects admitted to the crime and he reportedly provided investigators with a detailed statement of what transpired. He also implicated Haniff’s widow and said she let them into the house.
The attack, he said, was supposed to be a robbery but they allegedly killed Haniff after he refused to hand over the money they asked for.
