By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tues. July 10, 2018: In under a year from today, July 10, 2018, a notorious Guyana-born drug lord could walk out of a U.S. prison a free man and face deportation back to the South American country where he once ran a Phantom death squad and was considered the Pablo Escobar of the CARICOM nation.
Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan, aka ‘Shortman,’ is due to be released on July 8, 2019. Khan is now 46 and has been in jail in the US since June 2006, when he was arrested in Paramaribo with three of his bodyguards in a sting operation that Surinamese police said netted more than 200 kilograms of cocaine – the biggest cocaine haul in Suriname of that year.
The then minister of Justice of Suriname Chan Santokhi ordered Khan be flown to Trinidad instead of Guyana and upon arrival at the airport there, he was handed over to immigration authorities who then handed him over to US officials.
Less than 24 hours after being expelled from Suriname, Khan was arraigned at the Brooklyn Federal Court in New York City on June 30, 2006 on a charge of “conspiring to import cocaine” and was ordered to be detained at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.
He was formally sentenced on October 2009 to trafficking large amounts of cocaine in the United States of America, witness tampering and illegal firearm possession.
Prisoner 03651-082, who is also believed to be responsible for hundreds of killings in Guyana in the early to mid-2000s, is serving out the rest of his year at the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami, FL.
Under U.S. law, he is set to be handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents upon his release for detention and deportation back to his homeland, where he was once considered “untouchable.”
Khan trafficked cocaine from Colombia into the United States and used construction and forestry businesses to launder money. According to cables published by Wikileaks, Khan used to pay his low-level security personnel USD 1,600 per month – at least eight times what they previously earned with the Guyana Police Force.
Meanwhile, HGTV, a Guyanese television channel, quoted the country’s Crime Chief, Assistant Commissioner of police Paul Williams, as saying Guyanese have nothing to fear and that Khan will have to toe the line once he gets back there.
