A RETIRED police officer who was arrested and held in a police cell overnight on suspicion of larceny of gas cylinders reported missing from the compound of Industrial Gas Ltd (now Massy Gas) in 2010, will receive a little over $200,000 in compensation from the State for malicious prosecution.
Chatraphal Lowkaran and his wife Solina Ali Lowkaran operated various businesses which also included gas distribution using gas cylinders from an original stock they inherited from Lowkaran’s father.
They were unofficial gas distributors for IGL since the 1980s and although they stopped for a period of time, they continue to operate as unofficial distributors for Massy Gas.
Lowkaran and his mother-in-law Hazroon Ali were arrested on June 28, 2010 at her bakery in San Juan. Police went there with a search warrant in her name looking for IGL gas cylinders which had been reported missing from the company’s Point Lisas compound days before.
Ali was released but Lowkaran was eventually charged with larceny of the gas cylinders. These charges were eventually dismissed after the prosecution of them did not proceed.
In a ruling in which she ordered the State to pay to Lowkaran a total of $220,387.20, plus $42,058.08 in costs, Justice Eleanor Donaldson-Honeywell held it was “pellucidly clear” that the police had no evidence to suspect Lowkaran was guilty of larceny of the gas cylinders.
She also said they failed to verify that the cylinders found at his mother-in-law’s bakery were in fact stolen and, as a result, his arrest was “unreasonable and oppressive.”
Lowkaran was represented by attorneys Jagdeo Singh, Desiree Sankar, Karina Singh and Keston Lewis.
The judge pointed out that at the trial, the charging officer agreed that the best evidence of larceny was where a person was seen in the act of stealing and, in this case, where there was no eyewitness or any other evidence, the basis for suspicion would be based on the doctrine of recent possession.
This doctrine relates to the possession of stolen property soon after its theft and, if unexplained, it can be presumed the person possessing it stole it or received it knowing it was stolen.
However, to prove “recent possession” the property had to actually have been stolen. In her analysis of the evidence, Donaldson-Honeywell agreed with Lowkaran’s attorneys that the police’s evidence was “deficient in every aspect in establishing any reasonable or probable basis for suspicion regarding the crime of larceny.”
She said there was no evidence of “recent possession” nor was there evidence that the cylinders found at the bakery, were part of the alleged missing inventory since there was testimony that IGL did not track the sale of cylinders product by serial numbers.
“…The fact that IGL was stamped on the cylinders was not sufficient basis for suspecting that they were stolen. Instead, what was required was an inventory of the serial numbers or other unique identifiers of the alleged missing cylinders which could be compared with those located,” the judge said.
