Our country has been asked to accept something it should refuse: that a police officer who admits firing on the car of the elected Leader of the Opposition needs no scrutiny, while the Opposition Leader himself is held for days and then charged. Bail has freed Azruddin Mohamed. It has not freed the State from its duty to explain itself. Two accounts of the Kitty shooting exist, they cannot both be true, and not one institution has shown the courage to test them against each other.
Begin with what is not in dispute. Shortly before midnight on 12 October, Senior Superintendent Prem Narine, head of the Special Branch, discharged his service weapon several times at a black Toyota Allion carrying Mohamed, his relative Mario Mohamed and the driver, Eugene Thorne.
Police themselves concede that he fired. What they claim is that he did so only after hearing a shot. Mohamed says no shot came from his vehicle, that the men were simply observing the heavy security outside the officer’s home, and that the pistol police say they recovered was planted. His party adds that the car was searched at the roadside, that nothing was found, and that a weapon appeared only after it reached the station.
Either account, if true, is shocking. If Mohamed is right, state agents shot at a political rival and then manufactured evidence. If the police are right, an Opposition Leader approached the home of a witness against him armed. The seriousness of both versions is precisely why neither can be waved through. Yet the State behaved as if only one required proof. Mohamed and his two aides were detained for days.
The Government’s early statement branded the two staffers “henchmen” and dragged in unproven homicide allegations from the extradition hearings, language fit for a verdict. And the only man whose actions are admitted, who fired the shots, has, so far as the public has been told, faced no charge, no suspension and no questioning under caution.
Consider who is who. Mohamed holds a constitutional office, conferred by the ballot. Whatever the United States prosecutors allege against him, and they have alleged fraud and money laundering, those are accusations, not convictions. Narine is a salaried policeman in a force many citizens regard as politicised. More to the point, he is the principal witness against the very man he shot at. That conflict was visible from the first hour.
A decent system would have removed the case from his own hierarchy on the spot, instead of leaving the inquiry inside the same walls that shelter him. The prosecution’s own conduct deepens the unease. Police first spoke of unlawfully discharging a firearm. When the Director of Public Prosecutions advised charges on Thursday, that offence was absent. The accused face counts of possessing an unlicensed firearm, possessing ammunition without a licence and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
If the State truly believes shots were fired from Mohamed’s car, why was no such charge recommended? If it does not, what remains of the police narrative? Add the casings found on the road, one .32 and four 9mm, and a fair-minded citizen is entitled to ask where each came from. Nobody has told us. This is where the institutions must answer.
The police acted first and explained later. The Government prejudged the matter in public. The Director narrowed the charges without a word on why. The courts, to their credit, have now granted bail of $750,000 each, which was the right outcome, but a magistrate cannot adjudicate what nobody has investigated. Four pillars of the State, and not one has asked the question on which everything turns: who is telling the truth?
Fairness demands that the other side be heard. Mohamed on Friday provided an explanation why he was outside a witness’s private residence, and the Government is entitled to argue that this alone could amount to interference with that witness. A firearm is alleged to have been found in the car, and the accused must answer for it in court like anyone else.
The Opposition’s wider insinuation that the President and Attorney General direct Narine has been offered without evidence and must remain a question, not a charge. Bail is not an acquittal, and nobody should read it as one. But none of that excuses the omission. The duty to investigate a police shooting does not evaporate because the target may himself be guilty of something.
Here is what a serious State would do tomorrow: hand the ballistic comparison of the officer’s weapon, the recovered pistol and every casing to an independent body, preferably with regional or international participation. Publish the gunshot-residue results.
Release the camera footage from Barr Street to the station, the search records and the chain of custody for the pistol. Order independent medical examinations of all three men, and state plainly whether Narine has been questioned and relieved of operational duty. Anything less leaves our nation with a verdict by assertion. Guyanese have lived long enough with justice that seems to bend toward power. They deserve proof, tested openly, whichever way it falls.
