Defence Board Secretary Dr. Roger Luncheon has said that the long-awaited report on torture allegations made against the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) would not recommend action against any officers found culpable, saying that this was not the intention of the report.
Speaking at his post cabinet media briefing yesterday, in response to questions on the report, Luncheon told reporters it was not the intention of the Board of Inquiry, which investigated the allegations, to request that the Defence Board undertake any action against anyone.
“So when the report came to the Defence Board, it said put it in Parliament and let them debate it there,” he said.
Quizzed further on the details of the report, Luncheon said it contained statements made by those who allegations were made against as well as those making the allegations. He pointed out that some of the allegations were made to the police and the Police Complaints Authority.
“And then the report went into an examination of the allegations,” he added.
On the matter of the report being laid in Parliament, Luncheon said he assumed that it would come up at the next sitting of the National Assembly.
He denied charges that the government had been seeking to delay the report, noting that the motion that will facilitate the laying of the report had been tabled, but was recalled.
He added that five bills including the wiretapping legislation were given preferential treatment as part of government’s business which usually takes priority.
Late last month, the main opposition PNCR had again called for the government to release the findings of the army’s in-house probe into torture allegations, saying it would name the officers implicated if the report was not made public. PNCR executive Aubrey Norton had said that there was reluctance to release the findings of the report since it fingered members of the army who are close to the government.
“The names of the officers concerned are well known and in one particular instance have been placed in the public domain,” Norton had said. Previously, the party has identified the officers as a lieutenant and a captain. “If the Jagdeo [government] persists in its attitude of refusing to publish the report, the party will have no choice but to reveal the names of the guilty officers,” he warned.
He had also called on the administration to honour its promise to investigate the torture allegations made by two Buxton men, Patrick Sumner and Victor Jones, who said they were tortured over a three-day period after they were taken by soldiers during a joint services raid aback of the village.
In late November last year, three GDF ranks — Alvin Wilson, Sharth Robertson and Michael Dunn — who were implicated in the disappearance of an AK-47 assault rifle, alleged that they had been tortured during interrogations.
While the GDF had acknowledged that persons were being interrogated during the investigation, a senior officer had denied any act of physical abuse during the process. That officer had said that the army was committed to investigating any act of torture.
Wilson, Robertson, Dunn and several other ranks who were accused of being implicated in the disappearance of the weapon had told of being choked, pepper–sprayed and whipped with metal pipes by officers attached to the Military Criminal Investigation Department (MCID).
The GDF denied any act of physical abuse during the interrogation and it later launched an official probe into the claims. The army recently stated that it had handed in a report.
The army conducted a probe into the allegations and Luncheon had said publicly that the report was submitted to the board.
