The Persaud disclosures
Stabroek News Editorial. Wednesday, November 14th 2007
After months of official denial and failing memories, the Guyana Police
Force unwittingly cast fresh light on the darkest period of criminal
violence in this country's post-independence history.
Speaking plainly, in a way never quite done in public before, head of
the Criminal Investigation Department Mr Seelall Persaud last week made
three astounding disclosures on the shady activities of the shifty Mr
Shaheed 'Roger' Khan.
In short, Mr Persaud's first disclosure was, "We believe that Mr Khan
was involved in narcotics-trafficking." The second was that, since the
law enforcement authorities had arrested Mr Khan in Suriname and
extradited him to face narcotics-trafficking charges in the USA, "we
have seen a fragmentation of his gang." The third disclosure was that,
with Mr Khan's arrest, execution-style killings had declined from 43
last year to only 12 for this year so far. The connection between
narcotics-trafficking and gangsterism and murder is plain to see.
Now indicted by a US Grand Jury for conspiring to import cocaine into
that country between January 2001 and March 2006, the 35-year-old
entrepreneur, arguably, has been the single most prominent personality
in the annals of crime in this country. Nothing so exemplified Mr
Khan's swaggering style, self-importance and cocky conceit as his
whole-page newspaper advertisement of May 2006 in which he boasted, "I
worked closely with the crime fighting sections of the Guyana Police
Force and provided them with assistance and information at my own
expense." He bragged that he was thereby able to bring the East Coast
crime wave under control. Did he?
A convicted felon and a fugitive from the law of the United States to
which he emigrated at age 13, Mr Khan fled to the country of his birth
and established himself as a sort of property developer. Apart from
acquiring Kaow Island in the Essequibo River, he purchased a private
villa in the exclusive D'Aguiar's Park at Houston and seemed to have
had interests in a number of nightclubs and other premises. Through his
Dreamworks Housing Development Company, he constructed hundreds of
houses at Good Hope on the East Coast, Blankenburg on the West Coast,
and at New Hope and Farm on the East Bank, setting off a significant
building boom.
As Mr Persaud now explains, Mr Khan was a gangster. He employed
well-known serving policemen and ex-convicts to do his work, whatever
that entailed. At the height of the East Coast upheavals in December
2002, Mr Khan, accompanied by a hunting party including a serving
member of the police's Target Special Squad, was arrested at dead of
night at Good Hope on the East Coast with a vehicle containing a cache
of weapons including pistols, sub-machine guns, bullet-proof vests,
computers with digitised electronic maps of targeted East Coast
Villages and other communications equipment.
What should have been a cut-and-dried case was astonishingly dismissed
when Khan and his accomplices were charged and brought before the
magistrate's court. All the while, government officials including the
secretary of the Guyana Defence Board and chairman of the Central
Intelligence Committee denied knowing Mr Khan and what he was up to.
Mr Khan's house of cards started to fall apart soon after the US
Department of State published its International Narcotics Control
Strategy Report in March 2006. The report announced, "Drug traffickers
appear to be gaining a significant foothold in Guyana's timber
industry" and pointedly accused the Guyana Forestry Commission of
granting a State Forest Exploratory Permit for a large tract of land in
Guyana's interior to Aurelius Incorporated, a company controlled by
known drug trafficker Shaheed 'Roger' Khan."
The gloves were off. A new commissioner of police disbanded the
tarnished Target Special Squad, sent the head of the Criminal
Investigation Department on terminal leave and subjected Mr Khan's
properties to police searches for the first time. Khan, accompanied as
usual by his ex-police cohorts, fled to Suriname. The rest is history.
Mr Seelall Persaud's disclosures have now put the puzzle of Roger
Khan's propertied professional career into perspective. It was
therefore surprising that President Bharrat Jagdeo chose this time to
refer specifically to certain developments such as the construction
boom, especially in housing, which he said some suggested was based on
the narcotics trade. Mr Jagdeo called on those critics who claimed that
Guyana's economy was fuelled by the drug trade to prove it, charging,
"wild assertions are not enough".
President Jagdeo, perhaps, should direct his request for proof to Mr
Persaud who seems to have all the facts, at least as far as Mr Khan's
property development pursuits are concerned.
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