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Guyanese human trafficker busted in Canada

May 16, 2009 News

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has busted a Guyanese woman, Savita Singh, 43, believed to be working with a band of human smugglers.
It is the second time that she has found herself on the wrong side of the law on human smuggling charges.
Singh was arrested this week along with Vaughn McLuskey, 71, and Ontario residents Mohammed Habib-Yusef, 53, and Ravindra Hariprasad, 36.
The RCMP has reported that Singh, along with the three others, tried to illegally smuggle two Guyanese into the United States.
The four face charges of criminal conspiracy to violate immigration laws.
The Canadian charges are similar to trouble Singh faced in Maine in 2005.
According to media reports at that time, she was arrested by authorities in the US and subsequently pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle three migrants from Guyana into the US.
Then, she went by the name Savita Singh-Murray and was sentenced in a US District Court to 132 days in jail, which she served.
Judge John Woodcock at the time admonished Singh-Murray for her involvement in what prosecutors suspected was a plot to bring young women into the country to be forced to work as prostitutes.
The latest news comes on the heels of comments by head of State Bharrat Jagdeo that Guyana was being unfairly painted as a trafficking haven.
He had said that Guyana is a victim of unfair representation by certain international agencies and one of the agencies that unfairly represented Guyana happens to be the United Nations.
He made the disclosure when he briefed the media at the Hyatt Regency in Trinidad and Tobago on Saturday, following his meeting with United States President, Barrack Obama.
At the time he was attending the Fifth Summit of the Americas
“What we have is a problem which is the unfair characterisation of many of these countries based on shoddy reports done by many of the representatives of US agencies. Many of these get reflected in many State Department reports.”
President Jagdeo said that in the case of Guyana, it was listed as being among the worst for human trafficking.
He said that for a country to be so listed there should be at least 100 documented cases.
“We got on the worst category—Category three—and we ran the risk of sanctions. We asked, ‘How did we get there?’
And until today I can’t get more than three documented cases that they have. They are not willing to admit that they made a mistake.”
“My country has, right around the world, been characterised as a country that deals with the worst case of trafficking in persons.  It is a nightmare to try to reverse it once you get painted with that brush…Often it is about the quality of the report that goes up from the field offices,” Jagdeo stated.

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