Sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2016 chopping deaths of a Berbice couple; and 17 years for the 2017 death of a fellow inmate, Rooplall Abrahim has filed with the Guyana Court of Appeal, a notice of his intention to appeal.
He has not yet outlined the specific grounds on which he will be appealing but has cited sentencing as an area of complaint.
Just over a month ago at the High Court in Berbice, Abrahim admitted to Justice Brassington Reynolds that he had killed Bush Lot businessman Arthur Doodnauth Rajkumar and his common-law wife Diane Chamanlall.
The young man admitted guilt also for the killing of his fellow prison inmate, Neshan Jagmohan.
He was subsequently handed life sentences for the killing of the couple for which the judge ordered he must first serve 25 years before being eligible for parole.
Meanwhile, he was sentenced to 17 years for Jagmohan’s death.
Abrahim had been originally been indicted for murder but instead pleaded to the lesser offence of manslaughter.
The prosecution’s facts in the case of the couple were that on the morning of January 9, 2016, Rajkumar, 81, and Diane Chamanlall, 45, were discovered with gaping wounds about their bodies in pools of blood at their Lot 93 ‘A’ Bush Lot, West Coast Berbice home.
Abrahim, the prosecution said, was among bandits who had chopped the couple multiple times while demanding money but the elderly man and his wife did not hand over anything. A source had told Stabroek News that after the robbers demanded cash, they were told by the couple that they did not have any.
The men then continuously chopped the couple. As they packed items, the police arrived at the scene and the men scaled the fence and escaped.
Prosecutor Abigail Gibbs had said that Rajkumar’s body had at least 9 chop wounds, ranging from 3 cm to 17 cm in length, while observing that the killer spared no part of the elderly man’s body, since he had suffered chop injuries to his ears, head, fingers, shoulder blade and chest.
The prosecutor had also said that no mercy was shown to Chamanlall, who was found in a blood-stained night dress.
Meanwhile, in the case of Jagmohan, a cane harvester of Hampshire Squatting Area—he and his older brother, Ramnarine Jagmohan, a farmer, of Belvedere Squatting Area, had both been remanded on a murder charge over the killing of the Hampshire Squatting Area, Corentyne businessman Devindra Deodat, 34, called ‘Dave,’ in October of 2013.
Having attended court on June 21, 2017, they returned to their cells at the New Amsterdam prison where they were attacked by inmates with improvised weapons.
The men were rushed to the hospital where Neshan was pronounced dead on arrival, while his brother was hospitalized for some time.
A post-mortem examination which was done on Neshan revealed that he died from puncture wounds to the heart, lungs and kidneys.
