Magistrate Leron Daly remanded Police Prosecutor Mr. Mandel Moore to sit on the prisoners’ bench. Moore, who is the Legal Advisor for the Guyana Police Force, is assigned prosecutor for the cybercrime charges brought by members of the Force against Detective Sergeant Bascom.
The matter into Bascom was called yesterday and the prosecutor should have presented to the court a copy of the Police Force’s press conference. The evidence was not produced and the matter was adjourned for today.
The matter was adjourned to today to allow the prosecutor to produce the evidence (recording of the August 18, 2022 press conference).
This morning the prosecutor returned to court. Again without the recording of the conference.
The press conference is widely available and the prosecutor was so informed. The magistrate adjourned the matter for later in the day to allow the prosecutor to produce the recording. However, when the matter was called again, the evidence was not produced.
The magistrate invoked her powers under the law and remanded Moore, for a short time, for contempt of court. He was escorted to the prisoners’ bench by the police.
The case is being called again tomorrow, Thursday. Moore promised the magistrate to produce the evidence.
On September 14 Bascom was charged in the Georgetown Magistrate Court for “Using a Computer System to humiliate a person contrary to section 19(5)(a) of the Cyber Crime Act, No. 16 of 2018. The complainants are Superintendent Mitchell Caesar, Superintendent Chabinauth Singh and Inspector Richard Frank.
Bascom has been the subject of attention since releasing an explosive social media post casting allegations on senior officers in the Force and accusing them of unprofessionalism. This post has since been removed.
In the post, Bascom implicated Superintendent Mitchell Caesar in a cover up with a city businessman, Nazruddin Mohamed and security guard Mark Richmond in the killing of Ricardo Fagundes aka ‘Paper shorts’ on March 21, 2021. They have all denied the allegations. Mohamed has since filed a multimillion dollar defamation lawsuit against Bascom.
Fagundes was killed in a hail of bullets in front of Palm Court nightclub, Georgetown. The Force has distanced themselves from Bascom’s allegations, calling them untrue and malicious, and said they have enlisted international support to solve the killing.
