Retired Assistant Com-missioner of Police, Paul Slowe, is labelling as “‘strange” the Joint Ser-vices’ operation that resulted in the shooting to death on Sunday of an alleged accomplice of escaped death row prisoner, Mark Royden Williams called ‘Smallie’.
On Sunday, the Joint Services reported that they had initially succeeded in capturing Neon Howard, the alleged accomplice but he was later shot dead in a confrontation. Howard was said to have helped facilitate ‘Smallie’s’ escape from the Mazaruni maximum security prison. However, the police had never issued a wanted bulletin for him.
“The story that was alleged to have been made by the police sounds very strange”, Slowe said in an interview with Stabroek News. “If a person is arrested, especially a person who is supposed to be violent, one would expect that the first thing to do is to handcuff that prisoner. I think that would have been the first thing. So, the question is, why the prisoner was not handcuffed when he was arrested?” Slowe added that if the priority was the capture of Howard alive, vital intelligence would have been gained.