Glenroy Sinclair and Omar Anderson, Gleaner ReportersSCOTLAND YARD detectives helping to investigate the killing by police of three men in Westmoreland in April this year have recommended the future X-raying of bodies before post-mortems are conducted.
Acting Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Granville Gause, who is in charge of the Bureau of Special Investigations (BSI), said yesterday that two Scotland Yard detectives arrived in the island last week to guide the investigation into the killing of three men from Barham district, Westmoreland.
He said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Allan Brown and Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Shield of the London-based Scotland Yard met with members of the Constabulary's top brass last Thursday. Both men made a number of recommendations relating to homicides. However, the ACP said he will not get a final copy of the recommendations before today, as many of them had to be re-shaped.
"One of the recommendations they made is that all bodies in relation to homicides should be X-rayed before a post-mortem is conducted," said ACP Gause. "So that if a bullet is lodged inside the body, it will show up when the body is X-rayed."
But this was strongly objected to by some senior officers yesterday, who declared that it would be too expensive to X-ray the body of every person shot and killed by the police.
According to a member of the Police High Command, the method could work in complex cases.
Reports are that among the objectives of the review by the Scotland Yard team was to ensure that concerns of the family and community were met; and to identify further investigation leads and intelligence opportunity in support of the enquiry.
The men - Omar Graham, 23; Craig Vacciana, 22, and Phillip Baker, 21 - were killed in what the police claimed was a shoot-out on April 2, this year. Residents, however, said the men were murdered.
The police reported that about 9:45 a.m., a patrolling police party spotted a Toyota Corolla motor car with four men aboard. The police said the men began to act suspiciously and they signalled the driver of the vehicle to stop. The driver, however, sped away.
Sometime later, the police said the men alighted from the vehicle, pulled guns and opened fire at them. The police fired back and three of the four men were shot. The fourth man reportedly escaped. The injured men were pronounced dead at the Savanna-la-Mar Hospital.
The police said they seized two firearms, a home-made double-barrelled shotgun and a Ruger semi-automatic pistol with five rounds of ammunition.
However, residents in the community where the men were shot challenged the police's version of events by staging a massive demonstration to voice their disgust.
ACP Gause said the file on the killing of the three young men is to be submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for a ruling.
