Police set me up

MURDER accused Ryan Ramsaroop, who was freed by the High Court yesterday, blamed bad company as the reason he was charged with committing murder.

“I had nothing to do with that (incident) and the police set me up because I used to keep the wrong company,” Ramsaroop told Newsday after emerging from the San Fernando High Courts a free man. He was in custody for the past three years, having been arrested just days before his 18th birthday. Ramsaroop, aka “Papa,” was accused of the shooting murder of Ramesh Maragh, 39, at a Mayaro beach house on Friday April 14, 2000. The trial commenced last Monday before Justice Alice Yorke-Soo Hon in the Second Criminal Assizes.

Yesterday, Ramsaroop was freed after Justice Yorke-Soo Hon upheld a no-case submission made by his defence attorney Subhas Panday. The judge then instructed the jury to return a not guilty verdict against the accused. The prosecution’s case alleged that on the day in question, Ramsaroop and another man stormed Moonan’s guest house on Beaumont Road, where Maragh and his family were spending the weekend, and shot Maragh during a robbery. Maragh was shot once in the head and died on the kitchen floor of the beach house. Police arrested Ramsaroop nearly a month after the murder, after allegedly finding a cellular telephone in a latrine pit at the back of Ramsaroop’s grandmother’s house at Lewis and Sucre Street, Mayaro.

The prosecutor also submitted into evidence a police statement in which Ramsaroop explained that a friend named “Tony” gave him the cell phone and Tony later threw it in the latrine. Yesterday, Ramsaroop thanked his mother Mary, grandmother Sylvie Henry and attorney Panday for standing by him and believing in his innocence.