Home Affairs Ministry justifies spending on Lindo Creek remains

Jan 24, 2012 News

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The Ministry of Home Affairs is saying that there is nothing clandestine about the payment to a funeral parlour for the storage of the remains of the eight miners who were slaughtered at Lindo Creek, Berbice River in June 2008.
The Ministry, responding to an article carried by this newspaper under the headline ‘Payment for Lindo Creek remains described as flawed financial oversight’, is seeking to justify paying more than $32M to store the remains,
Volda Lawrence, the immediate past Chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which is tasked with scrutiny of the expenditures from the nation’s coffers, had told this newspaper that it was a flawed financial oversight system that allowed the Guyana Police Force to pay more than $32M to store the remains without raising eyebrows over the past four years.
Lawrence had explained that the reason this was not raised in the Public Accounts Committee before is because it would have been expended under a vague budget line item.
The opposition for years has been haggling over expenditures in the Budget under headings such as “Other” and “Miscellaneous” for which they say there is no clear definition of how the monies would be utilized very often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is but one example, she said, where money is expended without raising an eyebrow given its vague nature in the books but turn out to be ridiculous expenditures on the part of the administration.
But the Ministry of Home Affairs in a statement yesterday said that none of the financial regulations was breached and the expenditure was charged to the correct Line Item –‘6294 -Other’ in the current allocation of the Guyana Police Force.
This Line item, the Ministry said, caters for payment of expenses relative to cases of unnatural death where the Guyana Police Force has to intervene, which invariably leads to situations where they have to engage the services of funeral parlours for the transportation and storage of dead bodies prior to the disposal, by way of burial by relatives of the deceased or the State.
“The Ministry of Home Affairs wishes to reiterate that at all times appropriate efforts are made to ensure that money allocated to the Ministry and its Departments is expended in such a manner that value is received for such expenditure.”
Explaining the sequence of events that has led to the samples remaining in storage for so long, the ministry said that the evidence found at the crime scene suggested that persons in the Camp were burnt along with the Camp to the extent that none of them was identifiable.
Suspected human remains inclusive of feet, bones and skulls among other body parts were found.
According to the Ministry, assistance in processing the Crime Scene was provided by members of the Special Anti-Crime Unit of Trinidad and Tobago and Major Investigation Task Force of the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
The investigators advised that the identification of the persons murdered could only have been determined via DNA analysis.
As a result, samples of the human remains recovered from the Crime Scene were taken by the Jamaican Team (which included a Forensic Pathologist) to the Jamaican Forensic Laboratory for analysis, while, the remainder was stored at the Lyken’s Funeral Parlour.
The Ministry confirmed that the Jamaica Constabulary Force has submitted a report of a partial analysis that was conducted and they promised to submit the full report by the end of January 2012.
“The remains stored at the Lyken Funeral Parlour forms a vital part of the evidence collected. It is usual for remains of deceased persons in murder investigations to be disposed of after a post mortem examination is concluded by handing over the body to relatives of the deceased for funeral.
In the Lindo Creek case, which is an exceptional one, the remains were not identified and therefore could not have been handed over to anyone nor disposed of by the State due to emotional issues normally associated with relatives of murder victims,” the Home Affairs Ministry said.
“The result is that apart from the samples taken to Jamaica, the remainder is still stored at the Lyken Funeral Parlour at the expense of the State,” it added.
Those who were killed at the site were Dax Arokium, Cedric Arokium, Compton Speirs, Horace Drakes, Clifton Wong, Lancelot Lee, Bonny Harry and Nigel Torres.
The Ministry said that at the time, there was no viable option available to facilitate storage of the remains neither did the Guyana Police Force anticipate that it would have taken a long period of time to obtain the results of the DNA.
But although the blame for the miners’ deaths has been laid on the now dead Rondell ‘Fine Man’ Rawlins, the administration is still insisting that there is some amount of controversy surrounding the incident.
“Because of the controversy surrounding the Lindo Creek incident, the Guyana Police Force sought to exercise caution in the storage of the remains of the victims,” the Ministry’s statement said.
Fine Man Rawlins and members of his gang were subsequently hunted down and killed, and the security forces had suggested that the Lindo Creek case had died with them.
Owner of the mining camp Leonard Arokium, in an invited comment confirmed that the authorities had closed the matter with the death of Rawlins and his gang members.
“The last time I spoke with the police, (Commissioner) Greene had said that it was fine man who killed my workers. As far as he was concerned the case was closed, since he indicated that all the evidence pointed to fine man,” Arokium had stated.

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