3 accused in Berbice murder acquitted

After more than four years before the courts, the three men accused of murdering 49-year-old Mohamed Haniff at Experiment, West Coast Berbice, were on Wednesday freed by a jury, which returned unanimous verdicts of not guilty.
Royston “Sakie” “Killa” Dowden, a labourer of Bath Settlement; Ivan Lindo, a labourer and security guard of Waterloo, Bath; and Devon McCalmon, a labourer of Number 28 Village, walked out of the Berbice High Court after the 12-member jury found that the State had not proven the murder charge against them.
The trio had been on trial for the September 2020 killing of Haniff, who was beaten and chopped to death in his home during what was initially reported as a robbery. They were represented by defence attorneys Kevin Morgan, Horatio Edmonson, and Chandra Sohan, respectively, while State Prosecutor Cicela Corbin led the case for the prosecution.

During the trial, the State presented video evidence which it claimed showed the men heading to Haniff’s home on the night of the incident. Prosecutor Corbin told the court that the men entered the house armed with weapons, demanded money, and killed Haniff after he refused to hand over US$8,000 he had reportedly brought back from St Martin a week earlier.
Among the witnesses called was Government Pathologist Dr Nehaul Singh, who testified that Haniff died from shock and haemorrhage due to multiple injuries consistent with a severe beating and chopping. The prosecution also relied heavily on the testimony of Haniff’s wife, Bibi Zarifa Haniff, who recounted that three men stormed the home while she and her husband were upstairs.
She told the court that the men demanded cash, attacked her husband when he did not comply, and fled shortly after. She maintained that the incident was a robbery.
However, the prosecution’s case encountered major contradictions during cross-examination –particularly by attorney Chandra Sohan.
Sohan confronted Haniff’s wife with evidence that she had purchased Valium tablets earlier that day. While she initially insisted the medication was for personal use, Sohan suggested to the court that she may have administered the pills to her husband and attacked him while he slept.
The defence also noted that nothing was reported missing from the home and that Police later recovered the cash and jewellery the attackers allegedly searched for. This, they argued, supported the theory that the deceased was not killed in the course of a robbery.
All three accused men also gave different accounts in oral statements. One of them, identified as Darwin in court records, claimed that when he entered the house, he found Haniff already injured, further deepening inconsistencies in the State’s case.
Meanwhile, it had been reported that shortly after the murder in 2020, Police arrested and questioned Bibi Zarifa Haniff on suspicion that she may have orchestrated the attack, reportedly due to alleged financial difficulties and claims that she had pawned the family home without her husband’s knowledge.
One of the arrested suspects had also told investigators that she let the men into the house. However, insufficient evidence resulted in her being released on station bail, and she was never charged.
At the Berbice Assizes, after hearing closing arguments from both sides, the jury retired to deliberate for about two hours before returning with unanimous not-guilty verdicts for all three accused.
The men, who had been facing the possibility of life imprisonment or the death penalty if convicted, were immediately freed.