Haresh Singh murder: Police reject GHRA’s allegations on arrests of alibi witnesses

– notes alibi lawyer “flip-flopped” on video source

The Guyana Police Force (GPF) has dismissed a statement by the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) which it said posited that the arrest and detention of six of the nine women who claim to be alibi witnesses for murder accused Gladston Henry is shocking and smacks of malicious abuse of Police powers.

The statement by GHRA was published as a news article in another section of the media. Henry is one of the four men charged with the murder of 17-year-old Haresh Singh which occurred on September 9, 2020, at Number Three Village, West Coast Berbice.

“This is far from the truth,” the Police Force said in a statement in response to the GHRA missive. In fact, the Police Force said it is the premier law enforcement agency in Guyana with one of its statutory objectives being the detection and prevention of crime.
“It follows therefore that if in the conduct of an investigation into a specific crime, another crime is suspected to have been committed by a person or persons then the necessary action has to be lawfully taken,” the statement reads.
The GPF reiterated that the alibis provided by the alleged witnesses were investigated and found to be unverified.

This is evident, the Police noted, by the fact that the details of the purported alibi, which were given by their Attorney Nigel Hughes and attested to by the witnesses indicated that on the day of Singh’s murder, Gladston George was at home with his parents watching the video and live stream of a post-mortem examination being conduct on his brother Isaiah Henry.
The Police said that the alibi witnesses claimed that the post-mortem examination was being live-streamed by the murder accused’s father Gladston Henry Snr at the Memorial Gardens Funeral Home and that he [murder accused] remained home for the entire day.
However, footage of a video recording of the PME done by Police investigators revealed that Gladston Henry Snr had only entered the room to identify the body of his son, Isaiah Henry, and did not video record any aspect of the post-mortem examination, the Police statement added.
“In the article being responded to, in a recent statement attributed to Attorney Nigel Hughes, he is now flip-flopping and saying that the video recording and live streaming of the PME of Isaiah Henry was done by Attorney Patrice Henry on the instructions of Gladston Henry Snr.”
According to the Police, the alibi witnesses also claimed that one of the Police investigators into the murder, Inspector Rodwell Sarrabo, was at the home of the family of Isaiah Henry at the time that the post-mortem examination was being conducted and had seen the murder accused there.
However, the GPF pointed out that this was “proven to be blatantly untrue” as in the video recording of the post-mortem examination, Inspector Sarrabo was seen present at Memorial Gardens Funeral Home in the background of a news media video interview with Hughes.
Consequently, the statement added that six of the nine witnesses who were subsequently brought in to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Headquarters by Hughes, and who had not been threatened with arrest prior to being interviewed as alleged by the GHRA, were arrested for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Police disclosed that the alibi witnesses were subjected to a video interview after which they were released on bail. The matter is still under investigation.
The Police Force reminded that during investigations into the murder of Singh, Gladston Henry, while in Police custody, exercised his right to remain silent. “At no time did he inform any of the investigators that he was elsewhere during the time of the murder and that he had an alibi. It was subsequent to the interviews that his Attorney Nigel Hughes informed investigators that Henry had an alibi and that there were witnesses.”
“Contrary to allegations attributed to Nigel Hughes in the article, inferring that the GPF is either not disposed to or capable of conducting a fair or reliable investigation based on forensic evidence into either the murder of Haresh Singh or the murders of Isaiah and Joel Henry, the GPF pellucidly states that the investigations into these crimes were meticulously and assiduously conducted with efficiency and professionalism and charges were preferred after the requisite legal advice was sought and obtained.”