Rishard Khan

Cou­va South MP Rudranath In­dars­ingh, and by ex­ten­sion the UNC, is ask­ing the Prime Min­is­ter not to sub­mit the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry re­port in­to the Paria Fu­el div­ing tragedy to the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s of­fice, fear­ing it will be ei­ther ster­ilised or lost.

His call came dur­ing an Op­po­si­tion me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, where he said there is enough ev­i­dence to war­rant their con­cerns.

Not­ing a pre­vi­ous re­port com­piled on al­le­ga­tions of sex­u­al ha­rass­ment with­in the Min­istry of Sport, In­dars­ingh said, “That re­port was com­piled and to­day no one has seen that re­port, no one has viewed the con­tents of that re­port, be­cause it was sent to the of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al for sani­ti­sa­tion and it was buried there. It was killed there be­cause your Gov­ern­ment had no con­cern about sex­u­al ha­rass­ment, pro­tect­ing a woman at the hands of a then sit­ting Cab­i­net min­is­ter and so on and al­so re­al­ly de­ceived the pop­u­la­tion in that re­gard.”

He al­so cit­ed the re­cent blun­der at the AG’s Of­fice that led to a file “dis­ap­pear­ing,” al­low­ing the nine men ac­cused of the Vin­dra Naipaul-Cool­man mur­der to be award­ed $20 mil­lion in a civ­il suit.

“It reap­peared by some mag­ic and so on and up till to­day...we have not been told whether the loop­holes had been iden­ti­fied that led to the dis­ap­pear­ance of this file and what mea­sures have been in­sti­tut­ed to pre­vent the re­oc­cur­rence of files and so on dis­ap­pear­ing. We fear too, that if this re­port from the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry goes to...the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, it may dis­ap­pear,” he said.

“We ask you to guard this par­tic­u­lar re­port with the high­est lev­el of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.”

He al­so called for a pub­lic as­sur­ance that the re­port will be sent to the of­fice of the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions “so that it can be re­viewed based on the ev­i­dence and find­ings and if there is mer­it what we would term crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion then al­low the chips to fall where it may fall.”

He added the Prime Min­is­ter is al­so du­ty-bound to lay the re­port in the Par­lia­ment.