Submitted by Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID)
NEW YORK: The New York based think-tank, the Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID) Monday upped the antae against Guyana’s President, Bharrat Jagdeo, in the Roger Khan saga. The Institute accused Jagdeo of complicity with the convicted drug dealer and of lying about what it described as “a close relationship with Khan, whom CGID had branded – “The Al Capone of Georgetown.”
A confessed Guyanese drug baron, Khan last week pleaded guilty in Federal Court in New York, to eighteen counts of importation of cocaine into the United States, conspiracy, weapons possession and witness tampering. He is expected to be sentenced next month.
President Jagdeo upon learning of Khan guilty plea told the media that he did not know Roger Khan and that if Khan is guilty then he should “face the music.” However, the Institute said Monday that Jodgeo’s “Statements were at variance with truth and fact and are irreconcilable.” It added that “Every time he pronounces on the Khan case, those comments appears to be mendacious, self-protective and shifty, and raise more questions then answers.”
In addition to his conviction, the US Federal Courts also ruled that Khan is head of a violent gang in Guyana called the “The Phantom Death Squad,” which has committed hundreds of murders for hire with impunity, as well as hundreds of separate extra-judicial killings and drug related executions.
CGID asserted that “President Jagdeo must be made to explain how Khan was able to export billions of dollars worth of cocaine into the US, other parts of North America and Europe, allegedly direct hundreds of cold blooded murders for hire, extra-judicial killings and drug executions – with impunity and in full view of President Jagdeo, his government and the Guyana Police, with out being detected, arrested and prosecuted by Guyanese law enforcement.
The Institute further posited that it is ludicrous and pretentious for President to now call on the US government to provide intelligence information on Khan’s criminal enterprise to the Guyana government when it is obvious that the Jagdeo Administration was fully aware of Khan’s activities, and that Khan operated within a network of Presidential and governmental protection in Guyana. “Guyana is the only country where local drug barons, dealers and couriers have been pursued, detained, prosecuted and convicted by the US and other countries, while there have never been as much as an arrest in Guyana,” CGID stressed.
There have been allegations that Khan had been operating in partnership with individuals at the highest levers of the Jagdeo administration. In 2005, when his business establishments were raided by Police, allegedly at the behest of the US government, Khan issued a full page ad in local newspapers in which he claimed that he had engaged in “law enforcement” activities on behalf of the Guyana government.
Recently it was revealed that President Jagdeo’s signature allegedly appears on a government document which vested ownership of huge chunks of Guyana government lands to a company reportedly owned by Roger Khan.
Defending the allocation of the lands to Khan, President Bharrat Jagdeo last week claimed that his government did not lease land directly to Roger Khan. He said land is leased by public tender and that “Unless you have a conviction against a person, then you should not tender for public land and the vesting order… is after a public tender where after several people were allowed to bid and this company won the tender. That is how the vesting order was issued…it was in the name of the company and it was through a public tender,” Jagdeo claimed. “Roger Khan was not called in by the government and given this land on the site with a vesting order; it went through a public tender,” he added.
However, CGID’s Director of Communication, Jevon Suralie, Monday dismissed Jagdeo’s comments as as “a pathetic and unconvincing excuse for their harbouring and enabling of a criminal.” He noted that “CGID believes that President Jagdeo and other members of his administration are guilty of unquestionable complicity with Khan and his criminal enterprise.”
“Now that Khan has been determined to be guilty and has been convicted, President Jagdeo is apparently suffering from self-diagnosed amnesia. He is undoubtedly now attempting damage control and has been engaging in an unpersuasive fishing expedition to distance himself from his convicted felon associate – an alleged murderer and a convicted arms and drug dealer, with whom allegedly exists a nefarious, association. However, his denials are too late. The damage has already been done,” Suralie said.”
He added that Jagdeo’s claims that he does not know, or has never met, Khan are silly distortions which are laughable and incredulously fallacious. “It was this same President Bharrat Jagdeo who boldly defended Khan when he was arrested by US Federal law enforcement authorities in Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, and labeled his arrest a case of “US rendition,” Suralie observed.
He contended that “An established Guyanese businessman said that he decided to immigrate to the United States after, upon his arrival at the Office of the President for a scheduled appointment with President Bharrat Jagdeo, he was allegedly forced to give deference to Roger Khan, whom he said was meeting with Jagdeo at the time.” This claim, along with other hard evidence and attestations, have led CGID to contend that President Jagdeo and other members of his Cabinet, know and have had a relationship with Khan.
Suralie called on President Jagdeo to take a lie detector test and said “We have been assured that the US government is aware of Jagdeo’s and his government’s alleged association with Khan. We therefore call on the Obama Administration to probe any possible involvement of President Jagdeo himself as well as other members of his administration, in Khan’s vast criminal enterprise.”
The Institute also called on United States District Judge Dora Irizarry, the presiding Judge in Khan’s trial, to ignore the alleged fifteen year sentence proposed by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and to fully consider the copious impact of the crimes for which Khan has pleaded guilty and to impose the maximum prison sentence allowable under the law. It noted that the proposed fifteen year sentence would be an affront to the victims of Khan’s crimes and a gross miscarriage of justice.
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