Jensen La Vende

Nurs­ing a bro­ken foot and walk­ing with the as­sis­tance of a cane, for­mer act­ing gen­er­al man­ag­er at the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty (AATT), Dayanand Bir­ju, ap­peared in a Port-of-Spain mag­is­trate's court yes­ter­day charged with ut­ter­ing a forged doc­u­ment.Bir­ju is al­leged to have ut­tered a forged doc­u­ment from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts, Boston, USA, on Au­gust 8, 2012, for a bach­e­lor of sci­ence in com­put­er sci­ence dat­ed May 28, 1988, at Pi­ar­co, know­ing it to be false and with in­tent to de­fraud.Bir­ju ap­peared be­fore Chief Mag­is­trate Mar­cia Ay­ers-Cae­sar and was rep­re­sent­ed by Rosario Sookdeo.

Bir­ju, who was grant­ed $200,000 bail by Jus­tice of the Peace Ack­bar Khan on May 10, had that bail re­voked by the court, which or­dered that he should be grant­ed bail in the same sum with two con­di­tions at­tached–re­port­ing to the San Fer­nan­do Po­lice Sta­tion twice a week and sur­ren­der­ing his pass­port.Ay­ers-Cae­sar re­voked the bail be­cause there was a cler­i­cal er­ror in the ar­rest war­rant and the bail bond, which ex­clud­ed the con­di­tions for bail.

Sookdeo asked that the bail con­di­tions be var­ied, as his client had a bro­ken foot and could not wear any footwear.Ay­ers-Cae­sar said she was as­sured that the nec­es­sary ac­com­mo­da­tion would be made for Bir­ju, who through­out the pro­ceed­ings sat up­right and looked straight ahead, while three rel­a­tives hud­dled to­geth­er on a bench be­hind him.The case was trans­ferred to the Ari­ma Mag­is­trates Court and ad­journed to May 28. (JL)