The police force is awaiting advice from the Chambers of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) on whether to lay charges against the policeman implicated in the flogging of a number of miners and a woman and her child at Marudi, in Region Nine, earlier this month.
“The file is with the DPP and we are waiting to hear what they say before anything,” acting Police Commissioner Leroy Brumell told Stabroek News on Tuesday.
A video of the assault, broadcast on YouTube with the title ‘Police brutality in Marudi Mountains,’ showed a group of policemen and Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) mines officers standing around as one rank beat men who were trying to protect a woman and her child. The child was lying on top of his mother, who was on the ground as the men used their bodies in an attempt to protect them from the blows.
The policeman used a stick to inflict the blows. There were other policemen around with guns.
After the video of the beating went viral on the internet, Brumell had told Stabroek News that he had asked the police commander in the area for a full report and police investigators had been dispatched to conduct a probe into the incident.
While police statements were taken from some of the miners including the husband of the Verona Prince, the woman who was beaten, no statement was taken from her. However, police say that the investigations are completed and the file on the beating was sent to the DPP’s Chambers.
A relative of the woman on Tuesday told Stabroek News that Prince has no faith in the police investigations and she wants to be left alone. The relative said that woman is currently in Boa Vista with her family and will return to Lethem this Saturday, when the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment will allot parcels of mining lands to miners.
“Look, she doesn’t even want to hear about that now because she knows that nothing isn’t going come out of it. They take so long to take a statement from her and now they don’t have it, so I don’t know what file they have. How can they charge the man when she did not even give a statement?
Verona just wants to live and work in peace,” her relative said.
A senior police official told this newspaper that the police corporal who was responsible for the beating remains on active duty.
