HOMICIDE detectives said yesterday that Monday’s murder of Mark Anthony Yap Shing, 32 and Patrick Ramsay, 40, could have been committed by men linked to a drug trafficking enterprise in Florida, USA, of which Ramsay was a part.

The investigators said that Ramsay, who was deported from the US twice over the last 10 years, had disputes with a number of his former cronies in Florida, where he served a five-year prison sentence for drugs. The police said preliminary investigations suggest that he may have been killed because his US-based criminal associates concluded that he had broken a code of silence on their drug trafficking business.

At the same time, the police investigators told the Observer that Yap Shing was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the attackers struck and chopped and killed both men.

According to the police, a man said to be the “best friend” and a close associate of Ramsay was in January shot and killed in St James. The man, identified as Stephen Gordon, was put in the trunk of his car and set ablaze, along with a female companion.

About 5:30 on Monday morning, police made the gruesome discovery of Ramsay’s and Yap Shing’s bodies near a Toyota Starlet motorcar off the Portmore Causeway in the vicinity of the zinc factory. The heads were mutilated. The hands of both men were tied with electric cord and the mouths sealed with scotch tape. A latex glove was found near the bodies.

Superintendent Newton Amos of the Hunts Bay police yesterday described the killings as Mafia-type murder. “They were not shot, they were chopped in the head and Ramsay’s body had what appears to be a number of ice pick wounds to his left breast,” Amos said.

Police said both men left Ocho Rios at about one o’clock Sunday afternoon in the Starlet, owned by Derrick Tiechang of Ocho Rios, for an undisclosed address in Kingston.