‘It’s brutal what happened there’- Ramjattan on missing cocaine from Police HQ

By Leroy Smith

Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan says he is very disturbed that cocaine which was tendered into evidence in a court case, has disappeared from the Police Headquarters, Eve Leary.

The Minister was at the time responding to questions from the media on the sidelines of the commissioning ceremony of a storage facility at the CID Headquarters on Thursday. The more than one kilo of cocaine was discovered missing on Tuesday from the Police Narcotics Branch and is related to the case involving ex-policeman Travis Mendonca, who was recently sentenced to three years in prison after cocaine was discovered stashed in a false bottom of his suitcase.

“We are investigating it because I have my suspicions but I don’t want to make them public. But we have some elements in the Guyana Police Force that are if they are not totally reckless, they are so negligent that you have to put blame on them,” the Security Minister commented.

He described the incident as another disaster which will shine a negative light on the Guyana Police Force.

“We do have some systems in place but I suppose it is being violated too often and that is why we want a property room where they will be proper record keeping as to who had it, who open the suitcase, whether the cocaine was in the suitcase and all of that,” Ramjattan said.

He further explained that with the new storage facility, everything will be recorded so as to alleviate the issue of poor accountability.

“So no one policeman could come and say well, I did leave it on the desk and somebody mussy tek um out and that kind of thing. It’s very brutal what happened there,” the Minister further stated.