Commissioner checks whether police helped Muhammad

The task force looking into the activities of US sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad is awaiting a report from the Commissioner of Police Truehart Smith as to whether any police officers aided Muhammad to escape from the St. John’s Police Station last March.

Muhammad was detained by the police on 13 March, 2001 for attempting to check in someone under the name of Dwight Russell at the V.C. Bird International Airport, but later walked out of the Newgate Street police station.

According to head of the task force Attorney John Fuller, based on the entry in the station’s diary, the sergeant in charge took ill and went off duty at 11:39 a.m., and a minute later at 11:40 a.m. Muhammad walked out the station

He said that from evidence submitted by Keithly Nedd, Muhammad had told him (Nedd) that he had two postcards to send to two police officers thanking them.

He explained that “there are three pieces of evidence that concern the task force”.

“You can take what Muhammad told Nedd with a grain of salt, but based on those three facts we have to look and form an opinion,” he said.

The task force to date has not uncovered any evidence that either Muhammad or Lee Boyd Malvo had any bank accounts in the country.

“We don’t know if at the present time if they had any but there are no accounts in the name of John Allen Muhammad or Lee Boyd Malvo.

“I have been reliably informed by the chief investigating officer of the Office of National Drug & Money Laundering,” he said.

Attorney Fuller says he’s not disturbed by statements made by the Opposition United Progressive Party that he is unsuitable to head the task force because of his close association with the prime minister.

“When I started out we said we are going to report “warts and all.” You see we live in a common law democracy. In politics apparently people are guilty until they prove themselves innocent, but in law you are innocent until you are proven guilty – we go the basis that everyone is innocent until we can find evidence to show that they are guilty .

“We are satisfied that there has been no complicity with respect to what we have seen so far and we are going to continue this investigation,” he added.

The task force presented its second interim report to the Attorney General Gertel Thom on Friday.

Found this story on Lester Molester at www.grenadiantimes.com.
Not sure of the date. Latests news update at this site is Sept. 14, 2002.

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Bird threatens court action against sex, drugs allegations
St. John's - Antigua is engrossed in the drug and sex scandal surrounding Prime Minister Lester Bird, his brother and another top official even though for a second successive day the country's leader disclaim the allegations as a pack of lies. Prime Minister Bird on Wednesday wrote to the country's drug czar asking for a "full investigation" into the allegations. And the same time he has threatened legal action against the Observer newspaper for repeating what he considers the libel contained in the tape in a newspaper article which was published on Tuesday calling for his resignation. The article came a day after Prime Minister Bird, for a second successive day, denied the accusations of a teenage girl that she performed sexual and drug favours for him. In an address at Labour Day celebrations Monday Bird again denied the allegations and said they were concocted by opponents, led by Antigua's Observer media group, to destroy his government. "I'm very, very angry to the depths, the level, to which they would sink to try and bring this government down," he told a Labour Day rally Monday. Bird claimed the DEA had dismissed the allegations, saying "I'm not unaware that this video was passed to the US Drug Enforcement Agency and they would not even countenance the allegations." The Daily Observer newspaper claimed Tuesday that the girl "is under a US government witness protection programme." DEA spokesman Waldo Santiago, speaking from the agency's Caribbean headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico, said he had heard nothing about the allegations and would make inquiries. The video shows the girl speaking with two unseen reporters about incidents she claimed happened in 1999 when she was 14 years old. She is never identified by name but said she was born in Suriname and carries a Guyanese passport. She said she met the prime minister and his brother, Ivor Bird, at a party. "My first (sexual) encounter was in his office," she said of the prime minister. "He approached me and I didn't turn him down." She also alleged that she made payments for cocaine deals on behalf of the prime minister, his brother, and Chief of Staff Asot Michael. "They were involved in other illegal activities. They told me they needed a favour. I did it," she said. Bird told the rally he had "never met the young woman at anytime in any place." He said the girl's mother had come to his office "to complain about her daughter, and her frequent escapes from home." But he did not explain why the mother would come to him. The girl described one incident in which she said she paid for 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of cocaine that a Venezuelan boat dropped off on Antigua's east coast. She said Ivor Bird had arranged the transaction, and paid her $3,000. "The prime minister knew about it. He didn't say it was OK, but he didn't stop me," she said. Still fuming at the allegations, Bird Tuesday told Head of the Office of National Drug Control and Money Laundering Policy, Wrenford Ferrance that "you are hereby free to investigate this matter as it relates to me and other government officials." The prime minister also stated in his letter that Ferrance "to proceed according to law without fear or favour" against him and other government officials should he find that the allegations made in the videotape are true. Meantime. reports here Tuesday said one of the interviewers on the videotape, Julius Gittens, a former employee of Observer Radio who is now in Barbados, issued a statement in which he denounced the distribution of the tape. The report quoted him as saying that he was ordered to participate in its making by his employers, the Directors of the Observer Group. Gittens was further reported as saying that he "never intended or supported the distribution of the videotape." He claimed that he had provided the finished tape to the Directors of the Observer Group on the understanding that it would not be published unless further information was received supporting the allegations of the girl who was interviewed. Prime Minister Bird has given the publishers of the Observer newspaper until Thursday to apologise publicly for a story they published on Tuesday in relation to the matter which he claims libelled him. In an article "Lester must step down pending investigation" the newspaper reported on the contents of the videotape. In the article, the Observer stated, "Unconfirmed reports state that the prime minister received a copy of the tape sent by a person or persons unknown marked, "for old times sake." Bird's lawyers, who demanded the retraction of the story and a full public apology, pointed out that by the content of the story, the Observer "attempted to confirm that the allegations on the tape are true notwithstanding the prime minister's denial of knowing the young lady." "If the Observer does not withdraw its story and publicly apologise, the prime minister's lawyers will enter a suit for gross and aggravated libel in the Courts," a government statement here said late Tuesday.

Lester Bird

SNIP

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Lester in 1994 had nothing, though nothing, believed nothing. He was nihilist and still is. He was rudderless and rootless. He functioned out of no framework. He has no Trade Union history. No history of negotiating for and on behalf of the people of Antigua. By 1956 Bird had done it for 13 years, negotiate for the people of Antigua & Barbuda from 1943-1956. Lester Bird had no such initiation, no such history of involvement. Baldwin Spencer on the other hand has negotiated in all sectors of the economy, public and private, industrial and commercial for 25 of his 50 years. Lester Bird vanishes by comparison.

It is no accident then, that Lester was a monumental failure. Unrooted in the people and their struggles, he took off in the stratosphere of greed. Every single thing he touched bears the unmistakable stamp of endless greed. His monumental failure was written in the stars and in his political personality. From passports to Hotels. From Prison to Hurricane relief. From road building to land deals, all under Lester Bird bears the unmistakable stamp of private greed. His failure was rooted in his beginning.

Lester Bird joined V.C. Bird in 1969 when V.C.'s end had long forgotten the beginning.

Lester Bird began his political career in government then, in 1976, with Space Research in 1977 sending arms to racist South Africa, with his active connivance and benefit. He began too, extorting money out of Robert Vesco, granting him a passport, for money. As well as seeing to Vesco's escape for money, when the FBI came after him. Beginning then as a political hoodlum, the hand-writing of organised crime, on a Mission of Greed, Lester Bird and the yuppie section of the Labour Party which followed had to end in the gutter of political stagnation, abasement and shame. This descent into the political mire of abasement and vagabondage in public office was as predictable as it was inevitable.

If V.C. Bird represents the apogee, the highest heights, of the Labour Party in power, and he undoubtedly did, then Lester Bird represents its nadir, its lowest depths. And that is just as incontrovertible. The contrast is that lucid, even that pellucid!

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