Guyana: Two men found guilty of high seas piracy attacks that killed seven fishermen off the coast of the country in 2018 were given death sentences by a Guyanese court. According to authorities, this broke the back of a deadly group that had preyed on fishermen for years.
In a dispute over access to prime fishing grounds, Premnauth Persaud, 48, and Nakool Manohar, 45, were found guilty of planning an attack on several fishing boats in the vicinity of the Suriname neighbouring South American nation. While a dozen other fishermen were rescued after drifting on the water for several days, seven fishermen perished.
Some of the men, according to the police, were reportedly thrown overboard while being bound or weighted down with boat batteries. According to reports, some people were macheted.
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Justice Navindra Singh sentenced the men on Tuesday after a jury returned guilty verdicts, calling the attacks heinous and finding "no reason not to impose the death sentence."
The judge stated that allowing them to be released into society at any time would be "reckless and irresponsible" on the part of the court.
As he sentenced them to death by hanging, he referred to their deeds as "gruesome, heinous, and cold-blooded."
The men have the option of appealing the decision to the regional court of appeals as well as to Trinidad's Caribbean Court of Justice, which serves as Guyana's supreme court. On Thursday, their attorney declined to comment on their plans.
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Although hanging is still a legal punishment in Guyana, no one has been executed there since 1997, and the government has made no attempt to carry out court-ordered death sentences. In Guyana, there are more than a dozen people on death row, some of whom received their sentences more than 20 years ago.
The European Union and other international rights organisations have been lobbying governments to remove certain laws from the books, but authorities have so far defied their pressure. Some appeals courts have commuted death row inmates' sentences to life in prison so they can pass the time in jail.
Authorities had been battling such attacks up until the April 2018 attack along the Suriname coast in the southeast and less frequently in the Venezuela coast in the northwest. At the time, police attributed the attacks to gangs from Venezuela.
Nearly 30 piracy-related deaths were reported by police in the last ten years. However, since the arrest of the suspects, pirate activity in the Berbice border region with Suriname has not been a significant issue, police regional commander Shiv Bacchus told The Associated Press on Thursday.
"We had none for the entire previous year. None for this year as well. I have to admit that a 100% reduction resulted from the arrest and sentencing of the criminals, Bacchus said.
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Police attribute the sharp decline in incidents to the recent arrests and imprisonment of several Guyanese pirates in Suriname.