Former Trinidad minister charged with murder tells jurors police offered him a deal

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad: Closing arguments in the murder trial were involving Trinidad's former minister of local government, Mr. Dhanraj Singh will be presented today.

Mr. Singh, on trial for murder, told jurors yesterday that police said they would drop the charge if he spoke out about alleged government corruption, the Associated Press has reported.

Mr. Singh, who has pleaded innocent to charges that he paid two men to murder Mr. Hansraj Soomarsingh, 45, head of a municipal government body in southern Trinidad, accused Trinidad police of falsely arresting him.

He claimed that after his February 2001 arrest, an officer promised to drop the murder charge if he talked to police about alleged voter tampering and other unspecified types of government corruption.

"He told me that I should not go down alone," Mr. Singh said. "He said (my political party) had abandoned me and I should speak out." The former minister, who had been fired the previous year, said he had known nothing of any government corruption.

Mr. Soomarsingh's wife and his two children found him shot dead in his beach house on New Year's Eve 1999. Prosecutors have never established a motive, but said they believe a the two men had dispute about hiring for a government work program named the Unemployment Relief Program, which Mr. Singh oversaw. 

One of the men Mr. Singh allegedly hired to commit the murder, Mr. Elliot Hypolite, has been given immunity and testified in the trial. He said he, another man named Mr. Steve Cummings and a third unknown man traveled to Mr. Soomarsingh's beach house, where Mr. Cummings shot him twice.

Mr. Cummings was murdered in 2000 in an unsolved case. Mr. Hypolite said he was paid Trinidadian $7,000 (US$1,200) for the murder, but that Mr. Singh never showed up to make a second, promised payment.

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