The Guyana Police Force (GPF) yesterday defended the arrest of six women who claimed to be alibi witnesses for Glaston Henry Jnr who has been charged with the murder of Haresh Singh which occurred in September last year.
In a statement, the GPF was responding to a news item in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek under the caption `Human Rights body says arrest of potential alibi witnesses smacks of police abuse.’
“The arrest and detention of… the women… is shocking…Everything surrounding this event smacks of malicious abuse of police powers,” the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) said in a statement on Saturday.
According to the GHRA, each aspect of the procedure adopted by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) towards the witnesses raises questions.
“Why threaten the women with arrest prior to interviewing them? Why excessive bail of $100,000? Why detain all the women? The inference to be drawn is that such behaviour is intended to intimidate the women into abandoning their statements,” it concluded.
The GPF said yesterday it is the “premier law enforcement agency in the country with one of its statutory objectives being the detection and prevention of crime. It follows therefore that if in the conduct of an investigation into a specific crime, another crime is suspected to have been committed by a person or persons then the necessary action has to be lawfully taken”.
It added it was highlighting and reiterating that the alibis provided by the alleged witnesses were investigated and found to be unverified.
“This is evidenced by the fact that the details of the purported alibi, which were given by their Attorney Nigel Hughes and attested to by the witnesses, indicated that on the day of the murder of Haresh Singh, Glaston Henry was at the home of his parents watching the videoing and live streaming of the PME (Post-Mortem Examination) of his brother Isaiah Henry that was being done by his father Glaston Henry Snr. at the Memorial Gardens Funeral Home and that he remained there for the entire day. However, foot-age of a video recording of the PME done by police investigators revealed that Glaston Henry Snr. had only entered the room for the purpose of identifying the body of his son and had not video recorded any aspect of the PME.
“Notably, in the article being responded to, in a recent statement attributed to Attorney Nigel Hughes he is now flip-flopping and saying that the video recording and live streaming of the PME of Isaiah Henry was done by Attorney Patrice Henry on the instructions of Glaston Henry Snr”, the police said.
The police force further noted that the alibi witnesses also claimed that one of the police investigators into the murder, Inspector Rodwell Sarabo, was at the home of the family of Isaiah Henry at the time that the PME was being conducted and had seen Glaston Henry there.
“This was proven to be blatantly untrue as in the video recording of the PME done by the police, Sarabo was seen present at the PME and he was also seen in the background of a news media video interview with Nigel Hughes at the conclusion of the PME.
“Consequently, six of the nine witnesses who were subsequently brought in to CID Headquarters by their Attorney Nigel Hughes, and who had not been threatened with arrest prior to interviewing them as alleged by the GHRA, were arrested for attempting to pervert the course of justice and video interviewed by the police after which they were released on bail. This matter is still under investigation”, the police said.
The police said that it should be noted too that during the investigations into the murder of Singh, video interviews were conducted with Glaston Henry while in police custody, during which he exercised his right to remain silent.
“At no time did he inform any of the investigators that he was elsewhere during the time of the murder and that he had an alibi. It was subsequent to the interviews that his Attorney Nigel Hughes informed investigators that Henry had an alibi and that there were witnesses”, the GPF said.
Contrary to allegations attributed to Hughes in the article, inferring that the GPF is either not disposed to or capable of conducting a fair or reliable investigation based on forensic evidence into either the murder of Singh or the murders of Isaiah and Joel Henry, the GPF “pellucidly states that the investigations into these crimes were meticulously and assiduously conducted with efficiency and professionalism and charges were preferred after the requisite legal advice was sought and obtained”.
Singh’s murder on the West Berbice came during unrest over the slaying of cousins Isaiah Henry and Joel Henry. Singh’s killing was seen as a reprisal over the murders of the Henry cousins.
Henry Jnr, also known as Gladwin Henry, was charged on Tuesday alongside 29-year-old Philip Anderson, called ‘Rat-man,’ 27-year-old Joel Gittins, called ‘Bolo,’ and 21-year-old Charles Scott, called ‘Bucko,’ with the murder of Singh.
The GPF, GHRA and Hughes’ law firm Hughes, Fields & Stoby had initially planned last year to have the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology (Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forensica-EAAF) work on piecing together the deaths of the Henry cousins and Singh. Though an expert from the organization eventually visited he did not receive a series of documents that had been requested from the police force and was therefore not able to proceed further.
