WESTERN BUREAU:
THE LONG-AWAITED report from the Commission of Enquiry into the forced removal of 32 people from the streets of Montego Bay over a year ago, has been completed and is to be handed to the Governor-General this afternoon.
This was confirmed yesterday by Derrick Taylor, secretary to the commission.
The commission, headed by Justice Carl Patterson, a retired High Court Judge, has been considering testimony over the last four months and looking at evidence giving an insight into the circumstances leading to the removal of the street people, some of whom were of unsound mind, and who were allegedly bounded, gagged, pepper-sprayed and then abandoned beside a bauxite mud lake in St. Elizabeth.
Reluctant
The human rights group, Jamaicans for Justice, urged a reluctant government to appoint a Commission of Enquiry into the incident after Prime Minister P.J. Patterson at first refused to do so.
Yesterday, Elizabeth Hall of Jamaicans for Justice, said she was hoping that the commission, having deliberated for so long, would arrive at the only possible conclusion that it could and that, she said, was to hold the guilty persons accountable for what they did.
Nurse Joy Crooks, an administrator for the Committee for the Upliftment of the Mentally Ill (CUMI), said July 14, 1999 marked a night of horror and shame in Montego Bay. "Persons or organisations unknown abducted these unfortunate individuals and abandoned them in a remote area of St. Elizabeth. We have waited all this time for justice to be done and we can only hope that it will not be in vain".
However, there was an air of resignation among residents of Montego Bay yesterday regarding the affair with many convinced that nothing would come from the report.
Surprised
"I would be very surprised if anything came from this," said businessman David Dixon. "This was a grand waste of money and valuable time. The guilty will walk free and it will be like the entire thing never happened."
"I understand the deep cynicism among residents but the truth will have to come out eventually. We will not rest," Ms. Hall vowed.
