Phantom Killer Squad ...AFC to seek foreign help with new inquiry

Phantom Killer Squad …AFC to seek foreign help with new inquiry

Jun 21, 2008 News

Leader of the Alliance for Change (AFC) Raphael Trotman says that the unsurprising non-response by the government regarding the call to reopen the inquiry into the mysterious killings between 2002 and 2006 by an alleged ‘Phantom Killing Squad’ has prompted the party to make an appeal to international bodies.
Trotman made the disclosure during a press briefing on Wednesday.
“We need to have an understanding of what transpired…There were too many unexplained killings.”
He noted that he has already made contact with the United Nations Office on Human Right about what possibilities exist in the context of having the inquiry reopened.
According to Trotman, he is currently awaiting word from the international community on what options are available. The opposition parliamentary parties, on May 22 last, had issued a call for the immediate re-opening of the investigations into the killings of several persons allegedly at the hands of a ‘Phantom Killing Squad.’
The call was made during a joint press conference at which the Alliance for Change (AFC), the People’s National Congress Reform and the Guyana Action Party (GAP) were each represented by their leaders, namely Raphael Trotman, Robert Corbin and Paul Hardy.
According to the party representatives, the call was made in light of the revelations coming out of the US court case involving Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan.
Khan has long been speculated to be the driving force behind the Phantom Squad along with former Minister of Home Affairs Ronald Gajraj who has since resigned from that post and is currently Guyana’s High Commissioner to India.
Among some of the more renowned murders are that of television personality, Ronald Waddell, who was riddled with bullets just as he was about to leave his Subryanville home and taxi driver Christopher St. Hill, called ‘Ninety’, who was found lying in his car just off the Turkeyen Public Road, East Coast Demerara.

He had been shot in the head and other parts of the body. Devon Cambridge, an 18-year-old from Mc Doom, East Bank Demerara, was found in a trench in D’Urban Backlands with his hands bound behind his back and his body bearing several gunshot wounds.
SA Nabi and Sons Managing Director Ashim Sheer Mohamed was also shot dead by a group of men in a car while sitting in his pickup that was parked in the North Ruimveldt Multilateral School compound.
During the crime wave that began with the February 2002 escape of five dangerous inmates from the Georgetown Prisons, several people suspected to be linked to criminal activities began to turn up dead.
For instance, on November 23, 2003, 21-year-old Kwesi Williams of Buxton was gunned down on the National Cultural Centre tarmac.
Williams had escaped from a car after being abducted by gunmen. He had bolted into the National Cultural Centre with the gunmen in hot pursuit.
The gunmen had then dragged Williams from the building and executed him on the tarmac. The following day, labourers working at the back of the Botanical Gardens unearthed a human skeleton. The remains were identified as those of Adrian Etienna, a Sophia resident who was abducted the previous month.
Another man who was abducted along with Etienna lived to tell the tale.
In 2003, six people who were traveling in a car were gunned down in one night in Georgetown.
Questioned about this case, one senior police rank had hinted that “unorthodox methods” were being used to combat the criminals behind the wave of terror that had gripped the country.
One person, Axel Williams, was fingered as a member of the notorious squad, after Shafeek Bacchus, a businessman from Princes Street, Lodge, was gunned down outside his home.
Following Bacchus’s death his brother, George Bacchus, alleged that the gunmen had actually meant to kill him, but had slain his sibling by mistake.
On June 24, 2004, George Bacchus was shot dead while sleeping in an apartment in his brother’s property.