Govt awaiting conclusion of INS probe - Dr Luncheon
Because of the length of time that Edgar Garfield Gibbons, who was mistakenly deported to Guyana as a Guyanese in April, has been here, the most comprehensive investigation has to be carried out to determine his nationality. Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, told reporters on Friday at his fortnightly press briefing that there was nothing the government could do while that investigation was being conducted by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Luncheon said that the Americans had definitively concluded that Gibbons was not an American and that though it was determined he was not Guyanese, the government could not just send him anywhere else as the government of the receiving country would have to be satisfied that Gibbons was one of their nationals, In the effort to determine Gibbons' nationality, the INS has enlisted the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Interpol and his fingerprints are being circulated worldwide. Luncheon said that once the issue was resolved the US would remove Gibbons from this country to the one of which he was a national. Gibbons has insisted that he is an American who was born in Monroe, Louisiana but the US authorities say that they could find no entry of his birth. Nor, they said, could they find any information relating to his father, whom he said was killed in Vietnam in 1968. It is the same situation with his mother whom he claims died of natural causes in 1969. Gibbons was deported to Guyana following a sweep of the prisons, while he was serving a one-year term for marijuana possession in 1998. It was the second such conviction as he served a four-year term for the same offence in 1993. He allegedly protested that he was not Guyanese but the authorities disregarded his pleas. The Guyanese for whom he was mistaken and whom Stabroek News located had been living in the New York Tri-State area since 1978 when he migrated to the US. He is four days older than the man being held here.
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