Bou-Nahra will return to face manslaughter charge

For the last six months, he’s been outside local jurisdiction, but come Monday morning, Belize City businessman Ben Bou-Nahra will stand trial for manslaughter. Today, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions confirmed to News Five that the case against Bou-Nahra in connection with the death of Shawn Copius will start next week. The victim was shot five times by Bou-Nahra in the early morning hours of September seventeenth, 2005. At the time, Bou-Nahra claimed that he shot at Copius because he caught him attempting to burglarise his King’s Park home. That would have been the end of the matter, but physical evidence collected at the scene clashed with Bou-Nahra’s initial statement to investigators. Then in a strange twist to the case, that document disappeared from police files. At the time, then D.P.P. Kirk Anderson decided to charge Bou-Nahra with manslaughter, but it was when Anderson announced he was upping the charge to murder that the accused left the country. Since then, Bou-Nahra has informed the court that he was seriously ill, too sick to return to Belize. It seems however, that the reinstatement of the manslaughter charge has prompted a miraculous recovery and Bou-Nahra, according to his lawyer Dickie Bradley, will appear Monday in the Supreme Court.