Police outside the house where seven youth were shot dead in Braeton, St Catherine on March 14, 2001. (Observer file photo)

SIX police officers -- none of them Reneto Adams -- are to be charged for murder, in connection with the controversial killing of seven young men at a house in Braeton, Catherine in March 2001.

The names of those to be charged were not released by the police, but last night, highly-placed sources said that Adams, who led the now-disbanded Crime Management Unit (CMU), was not among them.

"He won't be charged -- not likely," said the Observer source. "It has been proven that his gun was not fired."

ADAMS... not among those to be charged

Police ballistic experts tested 83 weapons that were taken on the operation.

Adams had testified at a coroner's inquest that he was at the scene and was among a police contingent that came under fire from the occupants of the Braeton house when he called out that a police party was there to serve arrest warrants.

While the cops had insisted that the so-called Braeton Seven, aged between 14 and 20, died in a gunbattle with the police, human rights activists, including Amnesty International, said that they were murdered.

Guns the police said were recovered following the alleged shoot-out with seven young men at a house at Braeton, St Catherine on March 14, 2001. (Observer file photo)

The coroner's jury, in a June ruling, was inconclusive whether anyone was criminally responsible for the deaths, voting six to four that the cops had acted legally.

Without a split verdict, the matter was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), who had the authority to decide whether charges should be laid.

This week, the DPP, Kent Pantry, ruled that the six cops should face the courts, and passed on his findings to the deputy commissioner of police, Lucius Thomas, who is in charge of crime.

"The deputy commissioner has instructed acting assistant commissioner of police, Granville Gause, in charge of the Bureau of Special Investigations, to carry out the instructions of the Director of Public Prosecutions..." the police information arm, the Constabulary Communications Network (CCN) said last night.

It was not clear when the charges would be laid, but police officials said that precautions were in place to prevent the six from absconding.

"The ports are being monitored to prevent them from leaving the island," said Inspector Sonia James, the deputy head of the CCN. "No department leave will be granted to the persons (to be) charged."

Dozens of police took part in the March, 2001 operation at 1088 Fifth Seal Way in Braeton, which Adams suggested in his coroner's inquest testimony, that he commanded.

At the end of it, the seven youngsters lay dead, triggering one of the most controversial episodes of Adams' colourful career and the CMU's relatively short and extremely controversial existence.

The dead youth were:

* Reagon Beckford, 14;

* Christopher Grant, 17;

* Dane Whyte, 19;

* Tamoya Wilson, 20;

* Andre Virgo, 20;

* Lancebert Clarke, 19; and

* Curtis Smith, 20.

The police claimed that four guns, including the service revolver used in daring killing at a station house in the rural St Catherine village of Above Rocks weeks earlier, were recovered. Another man who was visiting the police station was also killed in that incident and a woman was shot outside.

Police also implicated some of the Braeton Seven in the killing, only hours before their own deaths, of school principal Keith Morris. Morris was shot dead at a bar where he was watching a game of dominoes. He was cut down, shot in the back, while he tried to escape robbers.

In the aftermath of the Braeton shootings, human rights groups called for a full investigation of the killings and rights groups such as Amnesty International, Jamaicans for Justice and Families Against State Terrorism, ridiculed the work of local investigators as well as the pathologist who conducted the autopsies.

They also rubbished the magistrate's Lorna Errar-Gayle's conduct of the coroner's inquest and laid store on the work of Danish pathologist, Dr Mygind Leth, who Amnesty sent to Jamaica to observe the autopsies.

"The evidence overwhelmingly points to the young men having been extra-judicially executed," Piers Banister, an Amnesty researcher and consistent critic of Jamaica's human rights record, said of Leth's and other findings.

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