Nearly three years after he was violently beaten by armed attackers and later prosecuted under Guyana’s controversial Cybercrime Act, political activist Brian Mac Intosh, popularly known as “Bryan Max,” walked free on Thursday after a magistrate ruled that the prosecution had failed to establish a case against him.
Senior Magistrate Fabayo Azore, sitting at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court, dismissed both charges against Mac Intosh after upholding a no-case submission made by his attorney-at-law, Dawn Cush, at the close of the prosecution’s case.
Police Legal Adviser Mandel Moore appeared for the prosecution.
In her ruling, Magistrate Azore found that the prosecution had failed to prove its case, resulting in Mac Intosh’s acquittal on two counts of using a computer system to excite or attempt to excite ethnic divisions on the grounds of race, contrary to Section 18(1)(e) of the Cybercrime Act.
The charges arose from events in November 2023, when Mac Intosh was allegedly ambushed along University of Guyana Road, Turkeyen, by three men armed with baseball bats.
Instead of seeing those responsible brought before the courts, Mac Intosh himself became the focus of a police investigation.
According to the evidence before the court, after going to the Turkeyen Police Station to report the assault, police seized his cellphone, detained him at the Brickdam Police Station and subsequently charged him under the Cybercrime Act.
Nearly three years later, no one has been arrested or charged over the assault.
Thursday’s ruling marks another significant courtroom defeat for prosecutors in a string of high-profile Cybercrime Act cases brought against opposition figures and outspoken government critics.
In separate cases, Magistrate Leron Daly in 2025 dismissed similar charges against political activist Sherod Duncan and former Georgetown Mayor Ubraj Narine, while Magistrate Orinthia Schmidt threw out cybercrime charges against Malcolm Harripaul.
The repeated collapse of these prosecutions has intensified longstanding concerns over the use of the Cybercrime Act, with opposition parties, attorneys and civil society organisations arguing that the legislation has increasingly been deployed against political opponents and social media commentators rather than being used to combat genuine cybercrime.
Mac Intosh’s acquittal also revives questions about the police handling of the 2023 incident. While the victim of the assault was prosecuted, the investigation into those accused of attacking him appears to have stalled, with no arrests made and no one held accountable for the violent beating.
The outcome leaves Mac Intosh cleared of all criminal charges, but the assault that triggered the sequence of events remains unsolved.
