Guyana’s middleweight boxing champion Howard ‘the Battersea Bomber’ Eastman was yesterday released on $25,000 bail being charged with possession of cannabis sativa.
It is alleged that on Friday, April 25,while returning to his home in Canje, Berbice after his weigh-in to fight Lennox Allen for the vacant super middleweight weight title, the 38 Eastman was held with four grammes of the illegal substance at a police road block at Weldaad, West Coast Berbice.
He was charged and placed before Magistrate Tejnarine Ramroop at the Blairmont Court yesterday. Representing the boxer was Attorney-at-law Joel Edmond who told Stabroek News that his client told him the substance was not found on his person but on the floor of the hire car he was travelling in.
Edmond said he told the court that Eastman was in the back seat of the car when it was stopped by police and out of the four other occupants of the car, and he was the only person who was told to exit the vehicle. He was then told that the police had found the marijuana where he was sitting.
As such he was taken into custody and was placed before the court yesterday. However, Edmond said that his client was calling foul since none of the other passengers in the car, none of whom he knew, had been detained.
Eastman returns to court on June 2.
