THE government has sought the assistance of four officers from the British police force, Scotland Yard, to help in the murder probe of Pakistan’s cricket coach Bob Woolmer.

The four officers are expected to arrive in the island early next week, a source close to the probe said yesterday.

“They were expected to arrive on Monday, but certain bureaucratic issues have yet to be sorted out,” the source told the Observer.

Head of the team probing Woolmer’s murder, Deputy Commissioner Mark Shields, himself a former Scotland Yard detective, has repeatedly said that the local police would seek the help of overseas sleuths if the need arose.

The arrival of the detectives was expected to be announced yesterday at a press briefing scheduled for the Police Officers Club in Kingston, but the briefing was called off at the 11th hour.

“It was cancelled because they were not sure when exactly the cops would be here,” the source said.

In the meantime, a visit to the Coroner’s Court yesterday revealed that the coroner for Kingston and St Andrew, Patrick Murphy, had not yet perused the Woolmer file.

“The coroner has not even read the file yet, we only got it yesterday (Thursday),” Dean Jones, an officer of the Coroner’s Court, told the Observer yesterday.

Efforts to get a comment from Murphy were blocked by Jones who flatly stated, “You cannot speak to the Coroner”.

The selection of jurors cannot begin until the file has been read by the coroner, and Jones said he was not clear when Murphy would be able to do so.

A backlog of over 4,000 cases has kept the less than one dozen staff members at the court with busy, and although the state has promised to speed up the inquest, Woolmer’s family may have a long wait before his body can be sent back to Cape Town, South Africa for them to perform the final rites. The body cannot be sent back until the inquest is completed.

Bob Woolmer’s naked body was found in his room two Sundays ago by a housekeeper at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel. Blood, excrement and vomit were splattered on the walls of the room. An autopsy revealed that he was strangled.