Manohar: Media has no right to judge Shah

WHILE speaker after speaker described the life and times of school principal Nazam Shah in glowing terms, his friend of ten years — Chaguanas MP Manohar Ramsaran — used to opportunity to criticise the media. “The media has no authority to judge Shah. No one knows why he committed suicide. Knowing the man as I do, his suicide was a show of strength, not weakness. “Because he was a man of foresight and probably foresaw the embarrassment it would have brought to his family and religion, he used the method of suicide to protect them. Neither man nor the media can judge him. That must be left up to Allah,” added Ramsaran.

Shah died Sunday after ingesting a quantity of gramoxone. This came two days after he was held and charged for drunken driving on the Golden Grove Road, Arouca. Meanwhile Hajji Yacob Ali, head of the Anjuman-Ul-Sunaat-Jamat Association, attacked officials of the same organisation and Shah himself, claiming if they had dealt with his problem, the former SRP sargeant would be alive today. In an unrelated development, Trinidad-born US Navy officer Justin George, better known as “Skippy” was laid to rest at the Tunapuna Cemetery after a service at the Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Tuna-puna yesterday.
According to a report, George, 22, a pilot in the US Navy, committed suicide at a Navy base in South Carolina on January 4, 2005. George, who was married in 2003, started having domestic problems. After several failed attempts at reconciliation with his wife Adriana, he took his life by hanging himself. When Newsday visited the family’s La Florissante home in D’Abadie, relatives were too traumatised to speak but a Navy colleague, who was in TT to present the US flag to his relatives, said the circumstances behind the suicide were still being investigated. Also buried yesterday at the Lapeyrouse Cemetery after a service at the the Cathedral of Immaculate Conception in Port-of-Spain was Marvin Romero, who was shot dead last Friday while speaking to friends at Pump Trace, Laventille.