The Guyana Elections Commission’s (GECOM’s) Chief Security Officer Ronald Stewart told the Elections Commission of Inquiry (COI) that he defied the instructions of the Deputy Chief Elections Officer (DCEO), Roxanne Myers to remove persons from the Ashmin’s building after a bomb threat, because he knew it was a hoax.

“…Everybody knew it’s a hoax…,” Mr Stewart said while being questioned by the Chairman of the Commission, Retired Justice Stanley John on Wednesday.

He added that “it was plain, all the senior people of GECOM were upstairs with other people, nobody made any attempt to leave upstairs to come downstairs to evacuate the building.”

Mr Stewart had explained that having worked with GECOM since 2011, he was elevated to the rank of Chief Security Officer, and was in charge of security during the conduct of the highly contentious 2020 elections.

According to him, the DCEO had instructed him to go to Ashmins Building where the Region Four Statements of Polls were being tabulated and certified. He said on the March 5, 2020 he and another GECOM security officer were in the Command Centre on the ground floor,

when he received a call from the DCEO indicating that the Tabulation Centre must be cleared.

“She instructed me to go into the tabulation centre and get everybody to come out of the building… [because] they were interfering with the work of the Returning Officer Mr Clairmont Mingo,” he said in response to a question posed by the Commission’s Lawyer, Senior Counsel Sophia Chote.

At the time, the US Ambassador Sarah Ann-Lynch, the then Canadian High Commissioner Lilian Chatterjee, and the then British High Commissioner Greg Quinn were among diplomats and international observers present, in addition to local and regional observers and party agents.

He said from where he sat, no one was seen interfering with the RO’s work. As such, he refused to comply with the DCEO’s instruction.

“I told her that that instruction was in appropriate and I am not going to carry it out…she said okay. That was the first instruction. She said okay, and she terminated the call,” he recalled.

According to him, about 15 minutes later, two CID officers entered the Command Centre and indicated that information at the time suggested that a bomb had been planted in the building. Assistant Commissioner of Police, Edgar Thomas, who at the time was Commander for Region Four, had subsequently arrived at the Command Centre, and had informed Mr Stewart that due to the bomb threat, persons were asked to clear the building but they refused.

The Police Commander, according to Mr Stewart, then left the building. He said that it was then the DCEO approached him a second time.

“She came down the steps and came to me and said Mr Stewart, you sitting there and a bomb is planted in the building, please get the people to evacuate…Well I again refused because I felt that those people in there were accredited, they were invited and if Ms Myers wanted them out, she should have been the person to go in there and tell them to come out not me,” the Chief Security Officer explained.

He said the DCEO left and went back to her office although there was an alleged bomb threat.

Stewart said later the same day he heard shouts coming from party agents and other persons in the tabulation room and it was then that he walked off of the job, refusing to investigate what was taking place in the room. 

He said he handed in his resignation the next day and left the job at GECOM.  However, he was rehired two years later in the same senior position and remains in that position.

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