When the trial of Allan Sim for the murder of hospital ambulance dispatcher Melissa Skeete continued yesterday, the court heard from police investigators that the accused had said that he stabbed the woman using a surgical blade with which she first attacked him.
Defence attorney Adrian Thompson has, however, challenged this testimony arguing that his client never told the police that.
According to Thompson, his client whenever questioned by investigators had always maintained that on the advice of his counsel he had nothing to say and would not be affixing his signature to any document they asked him to sign.
Sim is on trial before Justice Navindra Singh and a jury at the High Court in Georgetown.
The charge against him is that on November 23rd, 2015, at Carmichael Street, Georgetown, he murdered Skeete, with whom he once shared a relationship.
During their testimony yesterday, both Inspector Salish Roopnarine and Detective Inspector Suraj Singh told the court that during investigations the allegation was put to the accused and he revealed that he had stabbed Skeete.
The detectives said that in the presence of each other, Sim said that he and Skeete lived together since 2007 but that she had become disrespectful to him and started a relationship with someone else.
According to the witnesses Sim said that one night he went to Skeete’s home where he broke a window and saw in the house, the man with whom she had moved on, while adding that he (Sim) had bought her a water pump and paid her rent.
The witnesses told the court that in their interview with Sim he revealed that on the day in question he went to Skeete’s place of work and picked her up and that while in his vehicle an argument ensued about the man with whom she was living at that time.
They told the court that Sim related to them that during the argument Skeete armed herself with a surgical blade to stab him but that he managed to relieve her of it and stabbed her instead.
The lawmen said the accused told them that he never expected what ended up being the eventual outcome.
The detectives said that after an entry of what Sim had told them was made into the station diary, they asked him whether he would sign to what he had told them, but he refused, stating that his lawyer had advised him against signing anything.
Thompson during cross-examination challenged both Detectives, advancing that his client at no time ever made the statement they attributed to him, contending that they had fabricated it.
The lawyer suggested to both Roopnarine and Singh that Sim had informed them that he had been advised by his attorney not to make or sign to any statement, but the witnesses said that Sim had only told them of the latter admonition, while maintaining that he did give them the statement.
Skeete, a former ambulance dispatcher attached to the Georgetown Public Hospital was 31 years old at the time of her death.
The trial continues this morning at 9.
