Vincentian police testify in Antigua Passport scam case

Tuesday morning at 9:30 am, more witnesses will be called to the High Court to testify in a case brought against Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Ray Anthony John, and former passport office worker Shakema Charles.

The two are standing trial for conspiring to forge Antigua and Barbuda passports, having been implicated in the transfer of multi-layered infilling (MLIS) sheets which are used to provide high security for passports. The unauthorised use of the sheets from the local passport office are suspected to have happened between October 28, 2014 and April 6, 2018.

On day two of the trial, the first witness Superintendent of Police in Antigua and Barbuda Lisbon Michael, was recalled to the stand, before the prosecution moved to question their third and fourth witnesses – both police officers from the Royal St Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force.

Four middle-aged people who seemed to be relatives of the accused persons sat in the courtroom, accompanied by only the lawyers trying the case.

With the exception of Superintendent Michael, all other witnesses to the alleged crime testified via video call from a police station in St Vincent.

Corporal A Ford, the officer in charge of the investigation in St Vincent identified a number of passport bio pages belonging to people purportedly from Egypt, Australia and Dubai. This is in addition to testimony from Michael who identified pages of people from Iraq, Pakistan and Sudan who were all allegedly acquiring Antigua and Barbuda passports.

The fourth witness, Sergeant C Quow, in charge of the Major Crimes Unit in St Vincent, said that he gave permission to his officers to acquire a search warrant for the home of Lonzel Jones, John’s business partner. There, they found with another sales document, a MoneyGram receipt for EC$816 sent from officer John to Jones on April 4, 2018, two days before officers in St Vincent intercepted the alleged scam.

Questioning of Sergeant Quow stopped midway when John’s lawyer, Hugh Marshall, raised an argument when the Acting Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Shannon Jones-Gittens, attempted to lay the foundation as to why three of her witnesses, including Jones, may not be available during the trial.

He told Justice Tunde Bakre that the questions were irrelevant to the indictment currently before the court. The day’s questioning ended when the prosecution ran out of available witnesses (antiguaobserver).