President Irfaan Ali yesterday said the CARICOM Regional Security System (RSS) team that visited to aid the investigation of the murders of Berbice cousins Isaiah and Joel Henry, and Haresh Singh, has recommended additional work be done.
“I have not seen a copy [of the report] but I have been briefed on the content of it and from what I have been told the RSS [team] did some work and recommended some additional be done…,” Ali told reporters yesterday when asked by Stabroek News about the findings of the report.
The President was speaking on the sidelines of the swearing in of regional council officials.
Ali said that despite the recommendation for additional work to be done by the Guyana Police Force (GPF), the visiting team was satisfied with the quality of the investigations that were conducted.
“In total they were satisfied with the work the local police would have done,” he said.
Stabroek News was previously informed by a reliable source that the report recognised that the GPF did “extensive” work during the investigation of the three murders.
The RSS team, which comprised officials from countries within the Regional Investigative Management System, was in Guyana from September 28th to October 5th. During the visit, this newspaper was told, the team visited the crime scene, checked files, examined evidence and interviewed the relatives of the victims. Its 10-page report was submitted to local authorities two weeks after it departed.
Isaiah, 16, a student at the Woodley Park Secon-dary School, and Joel, 18, who worked at the Blair-mont Estate, went missing on Saturday, September 5, after they left home for the Cotton Tree backlands to pick coconuts.
After they did not return home, relatives lodged a missing-persons report with the police and subsequently launched a search. It was while searching that the bodies of the teens were discovered. The discovery of the bodies sparked days of unrest in West Berbice.
Autopsies performed on the bodies of the teenagers showed that they both died from haemorrhage and shock due to multiple wounds.
Days after this, another teenager, Haresh Singh, was also murdered in what is believed to be a reprisal killing.
Ali then took a decision to request assistance from the Caribbean Community Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (CARICOM IMPACS) after dozens of ranks combed the backlands of No. 2 and No. 3 villages, WCB and found nothing of “evidential” value for the investigation into the murders.
The police had said that a “methodical” search was carried out in the backlands of No. 2 and No. 3 villages, between 7am and 2pm on Thursday, September 17th, by a total of 75 ranks, drawn from Region Five, the Criminal Investigation Department’s Major Crimes Unit and the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) led by Commander of Region Five Edmond Cooper and a Lieutenant Colonel. They were also accompanied by government pathologist Dr Nehaul Singh.
That update came days after the police announced that investigations revealed that the Henrys were not killed at the location where their bodies were found.
The police had also said that DNA samples were also collected from the suspects who were in custody and sent for a comparative analysis to be conducted against the forensic evidence collected from the secondary crime scene.
The samples were sent to St. Lucia for testing and the local police force are awaiting the results of the DNA which was expected to return “shortly”, according to acting Commission-er of Police Nigel Hoppie.
