As the wheels in the Roger Khan case continue to turn, Smith Myers, a UK company specialising in cellular engineering, designing and manufacturing, has revealed by way of a letter to the court that it had issued an invoice billing the Spy Shop, for certain items.
The invoice and a letter which followed, was sent to Justice Dora Irizarry who is hearing preliminary arguments in the Khan case from Smith Myers’s office in Florida, USA, the state where the Spy Shop is also located, following a subpoena issued to Smith Myers by the court.
Smith Myers Vice-President Mark Baker, who signed the letter, which this newspaper has seen, said the Florida office had been instructed to issue the invoice by its head office in Britain and that was the only connection the Florida office has had with “the sale of these items”.
The letter also said that the Florida office did not have “any other documents referred to in that subpoena. The people you mentioned are not employees of this office.”
Smith Myers has been producing application specific cellular measurement equipment since 1986 and is well regarded around the world for its expertise and quality of equipment.
The company produces various pieces of technological equipment including one that has the ability to “follow a call from a control channel to a traffic channel and to analyze the protocol of the complete call transaction”. This equipment can be used by different users who can individually configure it based on their own requirements and captured data can be saved for subsequent analysis.
According to Smith Myers, with the use of this equipment a log can be created of the identity of the phones involved. “This information can be extracted from the individual sessions or from paging messages transmitted on the paging channel.”
Khan’s lawyers had told the US Eastern District Court recently that Khan had purchased computer telephonic surveillance equipment from the Spy Shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with permission from the Guyana government. The government has since denied this.
Khan’s defence attorney Robert Simels had subpoenaed the US Drug Enforce-ment Administration on April 29, stating that following Khan’s arrest, “FBI agent Justin Krider investigated Khan’s purchase of the computer telephonic surveillance equipment from the Spy Shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and found Khan had permission from the Government of Guyana to purchase and possess this equipment.”
At first, there was no response to this from the government. However, while in New York recently President Bharrat Jagdeo had said that in fact only the US government could have given permission for the equipment to leave that country.
In a background paragraph, the subpoena to the DEA said that Khan was alleged to have used the equipment to impro-perly wiretap various high-ranking officials and others within Guyana in order to maintain his “alleged drug organization.”
Khan, Haroon Yahya and policeman Sean Belfield had been detained at Good Hope, East Coast Demerara on December 4, 2002 by an army patrol and turned over to the police. The army had discovered sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment and arms in a pick-up the three were in. When they were held, Khan and his partners had told law enforcement officials that they were in search of Shawn Brown and the other prison escapees who had fled the Camp Street prison earlier that year. The men were later charged with possession of arms and ammunition and placed on $500,000 bail each.
The charges were subsequently dismissed by Magis-trate Jerrick Stephney at the Sparendaam Magistrate’s Court the next year.
His lawyers told the court in New York that following the February 23, 2002 jailbreak when the escapees went on a killing spree he responded to the crisis, providing financial and logistical support to the government. “During the crime spree in 2002, I worked closely with the crime-fighting sections of the Guyana Police Force and provided them with assistance and information at my own expense.
“My participation was instrumental in curbing crime during this period,” Khan had said in one of his media statements.
The US has since alleged that a group he had set up was responsible for the murders of over 200 people during that period.
