BY KARYL WALKER

Editor — Crime/Court Desk

walkerk@jamaicaobserver.com

AN internal conflict between members of the Klansman Gang has been blamed for the macabre beheading of a man in the troubled community of Lakes Pen, St Catherine, early yesterday morning.

The dead man has been identified as 31-year-old Sheldon Najeer, also known as ‘Jah Barke’.

His killers left his head beside a garbage drum, a short distance from his home, while his body was found on the railway line in another section of the community.

Najeer was reportedly dragged out of his house by a gang of thugs, who kicked in his door about 2:30 am. The gangsters then hauled him to a deserted spot by the train tracks and severed his head from his body.

Not satisfied, the cold-hearted killers took his head and left it on the public thoroughfare as a gruesome warning to all who had ideas of crossing them.

Najeer, according to his relatives, was rolling with the wrong crowd and decided to part company with them. However, his former cronies would have none of it and threatened to end his life if he did not continue as a member of the gang.

“We heard that they had threatened to kill him. He was supposed to have left the community tomorrow (today), but them kill him before him coulda leave,” one distraught relative told the Jamaica Observer.

“He was in downtown Kingston doing ‘cash for gold’ and they called him to the old market, but he did not go to them. He knew they wanted to kill him,” the relative added.

Najeer’s mother, Princess Najeer, was at a loss for words as she tried to comprehend the awful fate that had befallen her son.

“I could not look at the head, she said with a blank stare as she rested her left hand on her left jaw.

Inside the yard where Najeer slept before being dragged out of his bed, his relatives all had sombre expressions. No one claimed to have heard the commotion even though one neighbour confessed to hearing shouts of ‘murder’ about the time when the killers came for Najeer.

One relative said the men had come to Najeer’s one-room dwelling hours before and attempted to lure him outside by pretending to be police officers.

Their first attempt was unsuccessful as the police were called and the men left before the cops arrived. But after the police left the scene they pounced again and this time they did not call Najeer but tore down his door.

The room was ransacked and the bed on which Najeer rested was overturned. The wooden door was splintered into several pieces and came off its hinges.

Najeer’s murder has left three children fatherless.

The Klansman Gang has been imploding in the last several weeks as a faction based in Lakes Pen is at loggerheads with another faction based in De La Vega City, police sources report.

“There has been tension between two factions in the Klansman Gang. One man who holds sway in the Lakes Pen area is not seeing eye-to-eye with another in De la Vega City, and that has caused fears to rise. We are trying to keep a lid on things,” a cop from the St Catherine North Division said.

The Klansman Gang is known for its loyal support to the ruling People’s National Party and has set up a multimillion dollar extortion ring in sections of the old capital of Spanish Town and its environs.

Besides Lakes Pen and De La Vega City, the notorious gang is known to have run riot in the communities of Rivoli, Gravel Heights, Africa, Fish Ground, Lime Tree Grove, sections of Tredegar Park and Dam Head, among other communities in St Catherine.

Beheadings are a signature of the criminal outfit, with one of the nation’s most wanted and top-tier Klansman member Navardo Hodges suffering a similar fate in December 2011. Hodges, himself a suspect in a series of beheadings in St Catherine and surrounding areas, was shot in the face before his head was chopped off.

The head was found on the compound of a shopping centre on Burke Road, in the centre of the old capital. His headless corpse was found elsewhere in the town.

Hodges was named by police as one of the main suspects in the July 2011 beheadings of Charmaine Rattray and her 19-year-old daughter at their Lauriston home. The blood-curdling murders came days after their neighbour, 18-year-old Scott Thomas, was similarly decapitated by men believed to be his cronies from the Klansman gang.

Captions:

(2985)

Princess Najeer ponders the gruesome end to the life of her 21-year-old son Sheldon Najeer

(2986)

The ransacked room where Najeer slept before being dragged out by his kllers.

(2982)

Najeer Hodges.

(PHOTOS: LIONEL ROOKWOOD)