Uncalled witness dismayed at Gurkha acquittal
Most of the British Army personnel involved in the court martial of three Gurkha soldiers are winging their way home across the Atlantic. One young Belizean who also boarded the plane–although flying only as far as Houston–was twenty-year-old Ryan Edwards. Edwards, along with Said Musa Jr. and Eugene Zabaneh Jr., was scheduled to testify for the prosecution in the case. He was flown down on Monday from Texas where he attends university–but he reached Belize only to discover that the three defendants had already been acquitted. The reason for the acquittal was the prosecution’s throwing in the towel after Eugene Zabaneh Jr.–its so called key witness–refused to testify. But today, as he waited to board his plane at the P.G.I.A., Edwards told News 5 that Eugene’s testimony was not indispensable and that he and Said Jr. would have given substantially the same evidence.
Ryan Edwards
“I was very upset with the whole situation. I was misinformed, I was told that my testimony was going to be heard and I was told by Col. Bond that I would have to be prepared to testify whether or not Eugene and Sado testified, being that even if they didn’t testify they would still have a case. And obviously I was wrong, they just didn’t even give me a chance to testify, say my side of the story. Not saying that I could have maybe made a difference or not, but they should have at least given us a chance, don’t throw the case out just like that.”
Stewart Krohn
“Do you have any idea why they would have thrown the case out?”
Ryan Edwards
“I have no idea why they would have. I mean, first of all, we were…my mom was given a letter saying that I was not going to be needed as a witness in the case at all. And then we received a letter after that saying that if I don’t testify the case would be thrown out. So it was from one extreme to the next and we were given to make a decision the following day at ten o’clock in the morning that if we did not make a decision they would throw the case out.”
Stewart Krohn
“Had you been given the chance to testify, what would you have had to say to the court?”
Ryan Edwards
“Well first of all, the only thing I could say is what I saw. All I saw was Eugene been brutally beaten outside of the club and David, we never saw him make it out. For what we know, he never made it out of the club. It all happened so quickly. I don’t know if we would have maybe been able to identify any of the Gurkhas, we were never given that opportunity to. They never lined them up for us at any point in time; they never asked us if we would be able to maybe single one of them out, we were never opportunity. They came at us with… they had bottles in their hands as if they were aggressively coming at us as if they were ready to attack us. We were completely surrounded by them. It was only four of us, we posed no kind of danger towards them. We were completely being assaulted in this whole situation. We couldn’t do anything, all we could do is take cover and try to get out of there, and that’s what w did.”
Edwards declined to speculate on why Eugene Zabaneh Jr. refused to testify, but he claims that from the beginning it appeared to him that the British Army was not really interested in bringing to justice the men responsible for the death of David Zabaneh Jr.
