Amnesty International, the global human rights group, says the ground is being prepared for the return of Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams to front-line duties, and has predicted that the controversial cop will not be found guilty of the Crawle murders when the case is tried in September.

“I think everyone knows that Mr Adams and his colleagues will be found not guilty in September just as (in the case of) the Braeton Seven. The ground is being prepared for his return to work,” said Piers Bannister, the London-based researcher on Amnesty’s North American/English-speaking Caribbean team.

On February 11 of this year, six police officers were freed of the March 2001 murder of seven young men at a home in Braeton, St Catherine.

The cops were members of Adams’ now-disbanded Crime Management Unit (CMU) which, in May 2003, also carried out a raid aimed at catching an extortionist in Crawle, Clarendon. The CMU alleged at the time that they were fired upon from a house and returned the fire. Four persons, including two women, were killed.

The public outcry that followed led to investigations, which involved Britain’s Scotland Yard. In the end, Adams and his men were arrested and charged. The case is now pending in the courts.

Bannister made the prediction about Adams’ acquittal in an exchange of letters with the author of the Desmond Allen Interviews, published weekly in the Sunday Observer. The Amnesty official has frowned on a two-part interview with Adams that was carried in the Sunday Observer on June 5 and 12.

But Allen has defended the feature article on Adams and told Bannister that it was “fairly common practice in journalism everywhere, especially in the United States, to interview even convicted people serving time, when contact can be made”.

Bannister conceded that Adams had a right to a fair trial, presumption of innocence, and freedom of expression, until Adams had been proven guilty, but raised other concerns about the article.

“My point was that your piece stated as fact that human rights groups have produced no evidence to substantiate our claims that Mr Adams has been involved in murders and this is simply not true, we have produced evidence. The reader is left to believe that we simply make claims that we cannot produce evidence for and this is not the case,” Bannister said.

Allen countered that Adams had been exonerated in local inquiries and could not be labelled a murderer without being libeled.

Bannister, who spearheaded Amnesty’s support for local human rights groups in the inquiry over the Braeton killings, did not give specific reasons for his claim that Adams and his men would be freed of the Crawle murders, or that the ground was being prepared for the controversial cop’s return.

To support his point that the cops would not be convicted, the Amnesty official simply pointed to the organisation’s website, telling Allen:

“You simply choose to ignore a long report giving much evidence.”

Bannister also pointed to Jamaica’s low conviction rate of police officers accused of unlawful killings, saying not one cop had been found guilty of unlawful killing in the last six years.

“I doubt you could find another country where that is true. The police in Jamaica are immune from effective prosecution and are allowed to carry out killings with impunity, even in blatant cases like Flankers.,” he said.

In 2003, cops shot dead two men in Flankers, St James, in what was initially said to be a shoot-out. After it emerged that the men were in their 60s, the police eventually admitted that taxi driver David Bacchas and his passenger, David Brown, had been shot in error.

The case file is now back with the Director of Public Prosecution after Scotland Yard, which was asked to run tests on the guns used by the cops during the early morning shooting, completed its forensic report.