Commissioner recommends compensation for dead miners’ relatives

Lindo Creek CoI

…hands over report to President

Ten years after eight miners were killed at a mining camp at Lindo Creek, the completed report of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the massacre has recommended, among other things, that compensation be given to the relatives of the deceased.
The men were killed sometime between June 12 and 24, 2008.
Justice Donald Trotman, who headed the CoI, announced the intended measure at State House on Thursday, when he told reporters that compensation for the families is necessary, since they would have faced economic challenges following the deaths of their loved ones.
Asked about culpability, the retired judge told reporters that reopening some parts of the investigation was recommended. He added that State officials, including the then Police Commissioner, former President, and Home Affairs Minister, should be questioned.
President Granger, who ordered the Commission of Inquiry earlier this year, has said the intention of his Government is for Guyanese to live in a society without brutality, and that the administration will continue to look into causes of various killings which occurred in what he says was the era of troubles.
“Inquiries will ensure that those accused of crimes are brought before the courts of law. This Inquiry started the process of searching for the causes and culprits behind some of the most deadly atrocities committed during the troubles,” the president stated.
He also vowed that Government would work to expose the intellectual authors and the perpetrators of the deadly violence.
“It was a time of arbitrary arrests, of disappearances and of torture of young men; of the surge in armed robberies, narco-trafficking and gun-running. During that first deadly decade, there were 1,317 murders and 7,865 armed robberies,” the president said.
That decade of “troubles”, he mentioned, ended in the late 2000s. However, Government’s approach to the first of several inquiries was much criticised by the Opposition, which was in Government at that time. The Peoples Progressive Party felt the Lindo Creek massacre should not have been the first such CoI, but rather a more comprehensive review of the crime wave should have been undertaken.
The Opposition also contended that the CoI was geared to clear notorious mass killer Rondell ‘Fine man’ Rawlins’s name.
Now this latest CoI report has been submitted, it is up to President Granger to implement the recommendations which he sees fit. The miners Cecil Arokium, Dax Arokium, Compton Speirs, Horace Drakes, Clifton Wong, Lancelot Lee, Bonny Harry and Nigel Torres were shot and killed, and their bodies burnt at the Upper Berbice River mining camp which was being operated by Leonard Arokium.
The Lindo Creek killings followed two other massacres in 2008 – at Lusignan and Bartica.