Azruddin Mohamed has been convicted of nothing. Yet when Guyana’s Parliament sits this week, the man elected to hold the government to account will be in a cell at Lusignan, held on the least of the three cases against him while the State asks the High Court for more time.
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, —Wiredja Commentary| When Guyana’s National Assembly sits on Wednesday, the seat of the Leader of the Opposition will be empty. Its occupant, Azruddin Mohamed, has been in Lusignan Prison since October 30. He has not been tried. He has not been convicted. He leads We Invest in Nationhood, the party that holds 16 of the opposition’s 29 seats in a 65-seat House, and he cannot cross the threshold of the chamber Guyanese voters sent him to.
That is the dilemma, and it is not his alone. It belongs to every Guyanese who did not vote for the governing People’s Progressive Party/Civic, and to a region that likes to lecture the world about democracy.
Three cases, one cell
To see how strange this is, count the cases.
The first is the heavyweight: a United States extradition request resting on an 11-count indictment alleging financial crimes tied to gold exports, which followed US Treasury sanctions on Mohamed and his father, Nazar, in June 2024. On that matter he is on bail.
The second arises from a night in mid-October when shots were fired outside the Kitty home of Senior Superintendent Prem Narine, the police intelligence chief and a key witness in the extradition hearing. Mohamed faces firearm, ammunition and obstruction charges. On that matter, too, he is on bail.
The third is a Cybercrime Act charge alleging that he obtained police surveillance footage of that same night through a 20-year-old constable. It carries a maximum of five years. His lawyers describe it as a non-serious offence under the statute. This is the one for which Magistrate Abigail Gibbs remanded him until November 24.
Bail on the international indictment. Bail on the gun charge. Jail for the video.
The pictures the State wants kept
There are two accounts of that October night. The official one says Mohamed and his associates opened fire while filming Narine’s house. Mohamed’s affidavit says the reverse: that Narine and masked ranks fired on the car he was travelling in, forced the occupants to the ground, and that an unlicensed pistol materialised only during a second search at the police station hours later.
Cameras on a public road could go a long way toward settling which account is true. The defence says the footage is necessary to answer the charges and has invoked the Protected Disclosures Act. The State says it is national security data and that it was bought.
If a policeman was paid for it, let that be proved in open court and let the consequences follow. But a State that prosecutes a man over a shooting, then imprisons him for getting hold of the pictures of that shooting, should not be surprised when citizens ask what the pictures show.
What the Chief Magistrate said
The word “spurious” is a verdict, and verdicts belong to courts. So consider what a court has already said. Twice in two days last week, lawyers acting for the United States asked Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman to revoke Mohamed’s extradition bail. On the second attempt the court was told he was likely to be charged with murder over the 2021 killing of gold dealer Ricardo Fagundes. No such charge has been laid.
Latchman refused both times. Charges alone, she ruled, do not establish that an offence was committed; breaches must be proven, and none had been. “There is no evidence that Mr. Azruddin Mohamed is a flight risk,” she said, as reported by Demerara Waves.
A murder allegation raised in a bail hearing but absent from any charge sheet is not law enforcement. It is atmosphere. And when the evidence offered falls short before the one judicial officer who has heard the most of it, the public is entitled to wonder how sturdy the rest is.
Justice by calendar
Mohamed has gone to the High Court for bail. Attorney General Anil Nandlall responded by moving to strike out most of the supporting affidavit, sworn by Mohamed’s mother, as hearsay.
Arguments on that point are set for November 12, a ruling for November 13, and the substantive bail hearing for November 23. Demerara Waves reports the Attorney General has asked that this last date be pushed beyond November 26, which is to say beyond the expiry of the remand the application exists to challenge.
Nandlall told the court that “justice rushed is justice crushed.” It is a neat line from a man who sleeps at home. Mohamed’s reply, in his fresh application for interim bail, is the better one: “Each day in custody is prejudice which no later order can undo.”
The conditions of that custody are disputed, and from Montego Bay I cannot settle the dispute. His lawyers say he is isolated for all but minutes of the day under a light that never goes off.
The Guyana Prison Service says its logs show more than nine hours out of the cell on November 1, with family visits, medical attention and access to counsel; the Attorney General says the regime meets the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules. The judge has said she expects the alleged conditions do not exist and that, if they do, they will end.
But look at what the Opposition Leader has asked for should bail be refused: that the light be switched off at night, and that he be allowed the company of other prisoners. A democracy is in an odd place when that is the fallback prayer of its Leader of the Opposition.
Liberty by permit
There is a comparison that suggests itself, and it should be made with care. Guyana is not the West Bank. Mohamed has counsel, open hearings and a Chief Magistrate willing to tell the State no. The thousands of Palestinians held by Israel in administrative detention, without charge or trial, on orders renewed at the authority’s discretion, have none of that. The scale and the cruelty are of a different order.
The logic, however, is kin. Liberty treated as a licence, renewable at the pleasure of those in power. Movement that must be applied for; his own bail proposal asks that any curfew spare his trips to Parliament.
A “national security” label, which Narine has pinned on him from the witness box, doing the work evidence should do. And the process itself becoming the punishment, so that by the time a court rules, the sentence has already been served in instalments.
The Caribbean has rightly raised its voice for Palestinians. It should not lower it when the vocabulary of the security state is spoken at home.
The government’s answer
President Irfaan Ali insists the matter is legal, not political, and that his government has no hand in the courts. The US ambassador has said Washington’s case owes nothing to Guyanese politics.
Those positions deserve to be recorded, and the indictment deserves to be answered. Mohamed is owed the presumption of innocence, not a presumption of sainthood. If the evidence holds, he should face it.
But as Village Voice News put it in an editorial on the day he was remanded, “detention must never become a substitute for justice.” No one is above the law. No one is beneath it either.
CARICOM’s Secretariat sits at Turkeyen, a short drive from the courts where all this is unfolding. Its Charter of Civil Society commits member states to political freedom and due process.
The Community does not have to take Mohamed’s side to say plainly that an elected Opposition Leader, convicted of nothing, belongs in Parliament while the courts do their work.
On Wednesday the House will sit. Watch the empty chair. It will say more about the state of Guyana’s democracy than any speech made around it.
