FORMER Public Defender Earl Witter said yesterday that 44 of the people killed as a result of the May 2010 security force operation to apprehend Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke met their demise through extra-judicial killings.

He told attorney Michael Williams, representing the advocacy group Tivoli Committee, that complaints and evidence gathered during his probe revealed that the men were killed at the hands of members of the security forces.

Witter testified that he had no information that the remaining 32 dead were killed by the security forces. Witter had said in his report that 76 people died as a result of the operation of May 2010.

But that evidence came on a day which Witter was forced to defend his interim report from suggestions that it was “grounded in misplaced hyperbole” and not grounded in facts, and that it was based on “anecdotal evidence and innuendoes”.

The suggestions were made by attorney Peter Champagnie, one of the lawyers for the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), who also suggested that Witter was “tardy” in discharging his duty as public defender regarding his probe of the Tivoli operation and that “alacrity wasn’t the order of the day” in how he approached this matter.

But Witter rejected all the suggestions.

Witter had earlier agreed that he had the power to summon witnesses to his office and take evidence from them under oath. However, he said he never summoned any witness who made complaints to his office because he had more than 700 complaints, in addition to another 3,000 complaints not related to the events of May 2010.

He said, too, that he wouldn’t have been able to summon police officers because the complainants weren’t able to identify the members of the security forces they claimed committed the abuses.

Champagnie said Witter could have gone through the commissioner of police to find out which police officer was in charge of an area in an effort to determine who committed the abuses complained of.

Champagnie also presented a Jamaica Observer article of early 2014 in which INDECOM refuted Witter’s assertion at the time that the JDF had not been cooperative in making guns available for ballistic testing.

But this was not the end of the Champagnie onslaught.

Witter had testified on Monday that he heard no gunshot while he was with a party on a tour of Tivoli Gardens a day after the start of the operation to apprehend Coke.

But Champagnie confronted him with a statement by another member of the touring party, Dr Joslyn Salmon of the Jamaica Red Cross, in which Salmon said he heard gunshots while in the community.

“I hear with my ears,” was Witter’s response.

Witter had testified previously that in Tivoli Gardens he saw dismantled barricades while on the May 25, 2010 tour.

Asked by Champagnie if he would be surprised to learn that Dr Salmon made reference to seeing barricades in Tivoli Gardens that day, Witter said, “I’m not going to give you a yes or no answer, reason being, Dr Salmon was seeing things through his own eyes and I use the pair I had; I saw none that hadn’t been dismantled.”

Witter also testified on Monday that during the tour Bishop Herro Blair called to their attention a man who had been injured and laying on a piazza “twitching”. Witter said it was pointed out to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Sewell that the man needed medical attention, and said he didn’t know what Sewell did about the information. He said the man appeared to be dead when the touring party passed back.

But Champagnie pointed out to Witter that Blair didn’t mention in his statement that he saw an injured man twitching. Witter responded that he didn’t expect Blair would put in his statement everything he saw in Tivoli Gardens on May 25, 2010.

Williams is to continue questioning Witter today.

— See full story at www.jamaicaobserver.com