RCMP sought help of Guyanese counterparts to locate witnesses

May 14, 2011 News

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Canada- (telegraphjournal)- Desperation drove him and his wife, both from Guyana, to try to enter the United States illegally, Ijaz Ahamad Nabi told a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer on December 4, 2008.
Judge William McCarroll must decide whether to admit this statement, videotaped at the RCMP headquarters in Stoney Creek, Ontario, as evidence in the trial of four people charged with conspiring to smuggle immigrants across the American border.
A voir dire hearing, a trial within a trial, to decide this point was expected to begin its third day on Thursday in St. Stephen provincial court.
On May 13, 2009, Savita Singh-Murray, then 43, from outside St. Stephen, her brother-in-law Mohamed Habin Yusef, then 53, and Ravindra Hariprasad, then 36, both of Scarbourough, Ontario, and Joseph Vaughn McCluskey, then 71, of Fredericton appeared in St. Stephen provincial court.
The RCMP charged them with conspiring to encourage or induce people to enter the United States illegally between May 5, 2007 and May 11, 2009, contrary to American law – breaching a Criminal Code provision against using Canada as a platform to break the laws of another country.
McCarroll presided over a week of testimony in March. The trial resumed Monday. Federal prosecutors Monica McQueen and Jill Hartlen hope to close the Crown’s case Friday, McQueen said in court Wednesday.
The prosecutors hope the judge will accept videotaped statements because they cannot produce Ijaz Nabi and his wife Janet to testify.
The Canada Border Services Agency removed them from Canada and sent them back to the South American country of Guyana on April 9, 2009. Attempts to find them failed.
Defence counsel said the RCMP might have sped up the court date or charged the Nabis with immigration-related offences to keep them in Canada.
In April 2010, the RCMP sought help from the police in Guyana to locate the Nabis, Blair testified.
A local police officer left a business card with a relative. Janet Nabi called the police in Guyana from Suriname, saying that she would come to Canada to testify if she and her husband could get back the money they paid to get themselves smuggled into the United States, Blair testified.
Blair called the number in Suriname 15 times between March 26 and September 17, 2010, with no luck, he testified.
The Suriname authorities had no record of the Nabis in their database, he told the court.
In December, RCMP Const. Mike Burke received an email from the CBSA that a woman calling herself Janet Nabi left a voicemail saying she was in the United States.
The call came from a number with a Suriname area code, Blair testified.
Attempts to call this number failed. The Americans did not find the Nabis in their database, Blair testified.
Blair testified he wished the Nabis could have testified to show the “human side” of this trial. The RCMP officer said he interviewed Ijaz Nabi on December 4, 2008 at Stoney Creek after the Ontario Provincial Police removed the two Nabis from the sleeper of a transport truck headed toward Niagara Falls.
The truck driver and the front-seat passenger the Nabis thought would smuggle them across the border were, in fact, RCMP undercover operators. The traffic stop was a set-up.
In the videotaped statement, not evidence in the trial at this point, a contrite Ijaz Nabi admitted to paying C$5,250 and US$1,700 to a man he called “Turkey,” whom the Crown alleges is Hariprasad, to take them across the border.
The Nabis came to Canada from Berbice, Guyana to visit his mother in Waterloo, Ijaz told Blair in the videotape played in court.
Canada granted the Nabis two extensions to their visitor visas but their welcome ran out October 30, 2008.
“To go back where we come from is very, very bad,” Nabi told Blair.
Ijaz, a construction worker, could not legally work in Canada. When his visa expired he and Janet let it be known they would like to cross the border. They had family in the Bronx, N.Y.
“Turkey” visited their residence offering help, Nabi said. On December 4, 2008, the Nabis went to an address Turkey gave them, Ijaz said.
Turkey drove them in a van to a truck stop, Nabi said. Another man, Yusef the Crown contends, rode in the front passenger seat.
They met the supposed accomplices, who were really RCMP officers. Money changed hands and the Nabis got into the transport truck.
“If I could turn the clock back, I would turn the clock back,” Nabi said, describing himself as “someone very desperate to do something.”
He pleaded with Blair to return the money he paid to cross the border. “We have nothing if we go back. I am begging you, please.”
The next day, December 5, the CBSA released the Nabis from custody pending their removal from Canada. It was Ijaz’s 50th birthday.

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