Tonight police Corporal Oscar Itche is in serious trouble. He's the firearms clerk posted at Headquarters in Belmopan and the commissioner of police is alleging that Itche was running a serious scam out the backdoor of the police station.
It's a case of alleged mass fraud - where Itche was allegedly selling gun licenses for as much as three thousand dollars each. Now, gun licenses are free - and gun owners pay an annual fee to keep their weapons licensed.
The process and all the rules governing the issuance gun licenses had been revised this year by Commissioner to be more transparent and impervious to fraud.
But, the Commissioner alleges that Itche allegedly gamed the very system he was supposed to uphold. He allegedly copied the Compol's signature, switched the seal, and issued fake licenses to those wiling to pay the price.
And, the Compol found out all about it when he went to a gun shop to run a check on how the new gun license regulations were working at the retail side. What he found, shocked him. He told us more at his office in Belmopan today:
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"On Friday I said to myself let me just stop in by a gun dealer and see if they are complying with the new requirements that we had implemented of January this year and lo and behold when I went to this particular gun dealer and I requested that they produce to me what they are accepting from proposed recipients of license. So, when I went and saw the documents that were being accepted at the particular gun dealer, I noticed that many of the signatures were copied and further inspection of them, I noticed that the seal for the special protection was not the commissioner of police seal, but rather the dangerous goods office seal which would not be on a special protection approval and so that raised some concern to me and based on that I requested the gun dealer to surrender the documents which was done and I brought it to my office and I had my secretary go through the list of approvals because every approval that is done is recorded in a register. And when we looked at the approvals that we got from the gun dealer, they were not entered in our ledger which means it didn't go through the commissioner's office. We further checked with the firearms clerk office downstairs, the computer in the office and again it didn't appear in the firearms clerk office register. So, based on that I directed the good deputy HNCIB to launch an investigation into the matter and that investigation is still ongoing. I can tell you that the corporal in question, who is Corporal Oscar Itch has been detained since yesterday. A search of his computer that he uses at the police headquarters resulted in the discovery of some of the same letters in his computer. So, it shows that he was manufacturing these false approvals in his computer in his office. So, that is being looked at hopefully by end of the day today, charges will be laid by end of day today. We have found a total of twenty-eight of those approvals. And the persons to whom those approvals were given who have purchased these firearms, I say to them that those firearms are unlicensed and so we are in the process of recovering those firearms."
Jules Vasquez, reporter
"Are the people who sought licenses under this are those people known criminal elements or?"
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"Majority of them are of Asian descent, or Mennonites."
Jules Vasquez, reporter
"Gun licenses is something you have focused on, you have tried to standardized, you have tried to make it cleaner because over the years we've had multiple incidents of man selling guns. It's been a chronic problem in the police department."
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"I was extremely pissed. Up to yesterday, I had a bad weekend I must say. Like you rightly said there is a lot of guns out there and I believe that we need to be more stringent with firearms and that was the spirit with which we implemented those new measures this year. But again what caused this to happened was the fact that the same officer who is accused of committing this fraud works in the dangerous goods office that is the regulator and so the gun dealer was saying that in many of the instances when these people came with the copied signature and they questioned it, the officer is with the people and he said that it is legitimate. So because he is one of the regulators, because they are the ones who do inspections, the gun dealer took his word that the approvals were legitimate and based on that the guns were sold to them. When you look at the forms again the same officer Corporal Itch certified the copies to the gun dealers. So based on that I could fault the gun dealer."
So far 28 bogus gun licences have been found - all issued between December 2019 and May 2020. They were reportedly sold for three thousand dollars each, to an estimated total of almost eighty thousand dollars! The guns were all purchased at gun dealers in Belmopan, all but one at a single store in the capital city.
We'll keep following the story.
But, as a final note we should note that Itche has been before the court before for causing harm to a woman and her son in what we are told was a domestic dispute.
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