DEATHS IN CUSTODY. A special Amnesty
International report has detailed deaths in custody, mostly involving
black or ethnic minority people, and the lack of police accountability
for these deaths. In the year ending March 1999, 65 people died in
police custody in England and Wales alone, several in disputed circumstances.
Amnesty 'has indentified a pattern of deaths in custody as a result
of law enforcement officers' use of restraint techniques which has
led to "positional asphyxia" '. There is a serious failure
to investigate these killings and to prosecute the police officers
responsible.
YET ANOTHER RACIAL MURDER
Three soldiers have been charged in
connection with the death of GLYNE AGARD in a racist attack outside
a nightclub in Westbury, Wiltshire.
Jan Marthin Pasalbessi, who was born
in INDONESIA, rescued his 14-year- old stepdaughter from a racist
attack, but was later BEATEN TO DEATH in front of her at the Royal
Gwent Hospital in Newport, South Wales, where she had gone for treatment.
A BLACK MAN, Glyne Agard, was BEATEN
TO DEATH in a racist attack outside a nightclub in Westbury, Wiltshire.
BLACK FAMILY LYNCHED IN THE NORTH
OF ENGLAND
The deaths of two black men, Errol
McGowan and his nephew Jason, found hanged in the Shropshire town
of Telford are now being treated as murder; these deaths had initially
been dismissed by the local police as suicides. West Mercia's Chief
Constable has ordered a fresh investigation into both deaths after
pressure from the men's family and as a result of evidence that the
police had not undertaken a serious investigation into all the circumstances.
The family had previously been subject
to serious racial harrassment and this had been reported to the police
on more than one occasion.
THE BELATED INVESTIGATION INTO THE
BRUTAL UNPROVOKED MURDER OF THE BLACK TEENAGER STEPHEN LAWRENCE
Six years after the murder, detectives
"hunting" the killers of Stephen Lawrence have found a knife
and a metal bar in the garden of the former home in South London of
two of the five original suspects, proving, without any shadow of
a doubt, that, before the public outcry, the police had not taken
the murder seriously.
ELDERLY FEARS OVER KILLER DOCTORS
Conservative Member of Parliament,
Michael Trend, said that there was a growing suspicion among elderly
patients that their GPs (family doctors) could be out to kill them.
He said: "There is greater suspicion among elderly patients that
their doctor cannot be trusted and might kill them if they judge that
the patient's life is not worth living. That fear must be dealt with."
FORMER OFFICIAL ADMITS BRITAIN'S ROLE
IN INSTIGATING GENOCIDE
Reviewing Stephen Dorril's book, 'MI6:
Fifty Years of Special Operations' in the 'The Guardian' daily English
newspaper, Richard Norton-Taylor writes how Daphne (now Lady) Park,
its station chief in Hanoi during the war, provided Washington with
intelligence reports, as did the GCHQ base at Little Sai Wan in Hong
Kong. Park, who was to become a governor of the BBC, once recalled
that one of MI6's successful ploys was to "set people very discreetly
against one another. They destroy each other. You don't destroy them."
THE KILLING OF ROGER SYLVESTER (from
FRFI). Roger Sylvester was a young black man who died in January 1999
afyer a week on a life support machine. He was brutally arrested and
restrained outside his home in Haringey, north London, by 8 police
officers from Tottenham police station. No police officer has yet
been charged and there has no independent inquiry into Roger's death.
