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Coalition files parliamentary motion for speedy probe into West Coast Berbice murders
Murdered: Joel and Isaiah Henry
Murdered: Haresh Singh
Kaieteur News – Guyana’s main opposition, A Partnership For National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) Coalition, yesterday presented a motion to the National Assembly, calling on the Guyana Police Force (GPF) to expedite its probe into the murders of West Coast Berbice (WCB) teens, Isaiah and Joel Henry and Haresh Singh.
“We are here in our representative capacity to symbolically present a motion to the Parliament of which we are a part, to call on the police force to expedite its investigations of the murder of the Henry cousins and Haresh Singh,” said AFC Chairman, Raphael Trotman, to the media outside of Parliament Building.
The mutilated bodies of Joel and Isaiah Henry were found in the backdam on September 6, in clumps of bushes near to a coconut estate located at Cotton Tree, WCB.
Protests, marred by violence, had erupted over the news of their gruesome murder and days later, the body of another teen, Haresh Singh, was found lying in a patch of grass and bleeding from the nose at the Number Three Village backdam.
Singh was later pronounced dead at a hospital and was identified as the grandson of one of the suspects, a rice farmer, who was in police custody at that time, for the murder of the Henry boys.
Trotman branded the murder of the Henry boys “a hate crime” and blasted the police for their “incompetence” in solving the crimes.
“These crimes are undoubtedly hate crimes,” Trotman said, adding: “I’ll stop short of saying whether hate because of politics or hate because of race or even gender, but I believe that anyone who saw those bodies, either physically or through photography, would agree that whoever did this was full of hate and so the longer it takes for these crimes to be solved, the greater the inferences that the public will draw…the more pain the families will feel.”
Only recently, the police announced that they arrested several new suspects for both murders. This was after receiving credible leads sprung from a $3M reward.
The force came under heavy fire from the attorney representing the Henry family, Nigel Hughes, who viewed the reward as an “admission of failure” as they are still working on locating the crime scene where the boys were brutally slain, even after an intense search of the Cotton Tree backlands, with a full-fledged team of investigators.
Added to this, DNA sample results from a cigarette butt, retrieved from the scene did not match DNA taken from the suspects, who were initially arrested.
The law enforcement officials failed to make charges even after receiving support from a CARICOM investigative team. Efforts are being made to acquire the services of the special Argentine Forensics Team to continue the probe into the murders.
To bring in the Argentine team with the necessary equipment needed to conduct their investigations would cost in excess of $4M.
Home Affairs Minister, Robeson Benn, had stated that Guyana prefers to seek assistance from the US, UK and Canada, as it shares a special relationship with those authorities.
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