Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

GREEN

ON DECEMBER 30 when most persons were laying out their fancy duds for New Year's Eve celebrations, Assistant Commissioner of Police Les Green and members of his team were at the Martin Hill landfill in Manchester, searching for the remains of two senior citizens who had been missing since December 9.

The police found two decomposing bodies - believed to be those of 75-year-old Richard Lyn and his wife Julia, 71 - in abandoned vehicles at the back of the dump.

An on-the-spot post-mortem by Government pathologist Kadiyala Persaud revealed that cause of death was ligature strangulation. Results of DNA tests, which Green expects by next week, will determine whether the bodies are those of the Lyns.

"We will know next week whether profiles have been obtained from the bodies. Once they have that, they can then rate the other items which have been found and check them against the profiles of the bodies," he said.

Five persons, including the mother of one of the accused, are in police custody for their alleged roles in the disappearance of the popular couple who lived at Battersea in Manchester.

One week after their arrests, none had found legal representation.

This angered the 48-year-old Green, who accused the Manchester legal community of foot-dragging and making the police's job even more difficult.

Green's remarks did not go down well with Mandeville attorney Donald Gittens, who said the senior cop's outburst was irresponsible.

Green, however, did not budge.

"I stand by my statement. Unfor-tunately, the two men who appeared in court were not represented and only time will judge the truth behind those statements," he said.

High-profile case

Assistant Commissioner of Police, Les Green (foreground), and his team of detectives supervise the removal of remains from the Martin Hill dump in Manchester, on December 30, 2006. - Ian Allen/Staff Photographer

The disappearance of the Lyns was one of two high-profile cases in which Green led investigations in late 2006. The first was the murder of former heavyweight boxing champion Trevor Berbick in October in Portland.

Two men, including Berbick's nephew, have been charged with murder.

Despite a major drop in homicides in 2006, Green, a Scotsman who heads the Serious and Organised Crime unit of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), described the year as "challenging and interesting".

"Jamaica is a tough environment," he said. "There's a lot of poverty, illegal squatting and communities which thrive in an uncontrolled and unregulated fashion. That makes it much harder for policing to take place."

Although he has been working with the JCF since October 2004, Green was not officially appointed to his current post until January 2005. He joined Mark Shields, a long-time Metropolitan Police colleague, in the local ranks.

Born in Thurso in the highlands of Scotland, Green has years of experience dealing with Jamaicans and Jamaican gangs. For most of his 30-year career, he has worked in units assigned to monitor crime in Britain's black communities.

He was a senior member of Operation Trident, an elite force in the Metropolitan Police that investigated so-called black-on-black crime. In late 2001, Green was involved in the arrests of several Jamaican 'drug mules' who were attempting to smuggle cocaine into Britain.

When the British government offered to assist the Jamaican administration in its fight against organised crime, Shields and Green were seconded to the Caribbean.

More to be done

Their expertise has helped influence Government's purchase of several state-of-the-art forensic equipment for the police which Commissioner Lucius Thomas says has helped significantly in the arrests of criminals.

While pointing to improvements in the JCF since his arrival, Green says much more needs to be done before it becomes a formidable organisation.

"We have a long, long way to go around improving the forensics. Certainly, the senior crime capabilities here need a big input, especially equipment and training," he noted. "We need to bring up all of our forensic capabilities to the 21st century and unfortunately at the moment we are far behind."