Mangar is dead, but the controversy won?t die
You’d have thought that the police department would be crowing like a rooster who just stepped out the henhouse. But apart from a terse and enigmatic press release there has been not a single official word from any officer, from the commissioner on down, about Sunday morning’s killing of Belize’s most wanted fugitive, Wensworth Mangar. Some say the silence is due to caution in the wake of the fiasco surrounding the capture of Frank Castro in Punta Gorda. In that incident police mistakenly attributed the shooting of Castro to a local businessman and even offered him the reward. Perhaps, but many observers are finding the police explanation of a gun battle in the bush, with no supporting details, a little bit too self serving. So we sent News Five’s Patrick Jones out west, and while he found little in the way of witnesses, he did discover plenty of theories.
The mystery surrounding the death of twenty five year old Winty Mangar lies somewhere in this corn field between the villages of Valley of Peace and Roaring Creek. But the plants are not talking and since dead men tell no tales we may never know exactly what took place.
Patrick Jones
“Whatever happened in this area early Sunday morning, the owners of this farm and residents around the area either don’t know, or are afraid to say. What they did tell us, however, was that there was lots of police officers around. Shortly around eight o’clock, shots were heard being fired in the area and shortly after, police passed by here, with a body, presumably that of Mangar in a body bag.”
According to the official version, the killing of Mangar was the result of relentless police investigation. A press release from Headquarters in Belmopan says there was an exchange of gunfire between Mangar and a Special Police Task Force during which the fugitive was shot dead.
Patrick Jones
“The Mangar family say they are having a difficult time believing the police’s version of the story; for one they say Winty Mangar is the kind of person who prefers to be alone and if Marcel Gabourel and Douglas Williams were with him on Sunday morning, there would have been a bigger shoot out.”
Derry Bennett, Cousin
“Most naturally it wasn’t the police because they wouldn’t have picked up my cousin and asked him if that’s the right one. If the police, the police know who they are looking for so they would have known that it?s the right one and had no position to go and pick up my cousin of wrong information. So I think the police, the whole stuff is messed up.”
And it?s a mess that may take some time to clean up, since police surprisingly are not saying much about the incident. One version of the story we heard while talking to residents near where the shooting took place is that the police are covering up for the person or persons who actually did the shooting so as to protect them from possible retaliation.
Roy Mangar, Brother
“Well I myself do not believe the police shoot him. I believe it?s a civilian shoot my brother and they inform the police afterwards.”
Q: “Why would a civilian shoot your brother?”
Roy Mangar
“Well they had a couple thousand dollars on his head and probably they were looking for the reward or something like that.”
Q: “Do you know who shot him?”
Roy Mangar
“Well, I don’t really have no idea but there is a lot of hunter men and a lot of people in the village that didn’t like him so, I really don’t know who shot him, but I know it is a civilian, it?s not the police.”
The police say they shot Mangar dead after he fired on them with a point twenty two telescopic rifle. But now that he’s no longer at the top of Belize’s Most Wanted List, the circumstances surrounding his death are shrouded in nearly as much dust as Mangar had promised to kick up in 1998 in his infamous News Year’s interview.
Patrick Jones, for News Five.
One example of the confusion is that while the police press release refers to fellow fugitives Douglas Williams and Marcel Gabourel, it is not clear whether they were involved in the alleged shootout or even in the area at the time.
