Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Ex­act­ly one week af­ter the re­mains of Han­nah Mathu­ra were found in the back­yard of her fam­i­ly's Val­sayn South home, Homi­cide de­tec­tives have been told by Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions Roger Gas­pard to con­tin­ue work­ing on the in­ves­ti­ga­tion sur­round­ing her death.

Sources say this has led to po­lice be­ing in­struct­ed to re­lease Mathu­ra's par­ents, who are the two main sus­pects in her death, from cus­tody.

The de­ci­sion to re­lease Mathu­ra's par­ents comes af­ter days of lengthy con­sul­ta­tions be­tween DPP Gas­pard and in­ves­ti­gat­ing of­fi­cers on whether or not any charges could be laid against the 66-year-old man and 62-year-old woman.

The most re­cent meet­ing with the DPP on the mat­ter was on Mon­day, a po­lice source said.

The source said the chal­lenge with the in­ves­ti­ga­tion may have been the time con­straints to gath­er suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence in the mat­ter to jus­ti­fy the lay­ing of charges.

"It's not an easy sit­u­a­tion and the fact that no one ever re­port­ed her (Han­nah) miss­ing, means that they have had to start the in­ves­ti­ga­tion from scratch, which means we had a rel­a­tive­ly short time to get the ev­i­dence to­geth­er," the po­lice source said.

De­spite this, the source main­tained that the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was not over and promised that de­tec­tives will con­tin­ue to re­vis­it dif­fer­ent as­pects of Mathu­ra's death and "strength­en" their case, as there were al­so sci­en­tif­ic as­pects of the mat­ter that need­ed to be clar­i­fied be­fore re­turn­ing to the DPP again.

The DPP last night con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia that the in­ves­ti­gat­ing of­fi­cers need­ed to gath­er more ev­i­dence be­fore the in­ves­ti­ga­tion could move for­ward.

DPP Gas­pard did not con­firm how long his of­fice would take to de­lib­er­ate on the po­lice’s file on the mat­ter.

Po­lice are look­ing at two charges in the case - mur­der and the im­prop­er dis­pos­al of a body.

Mathu­ra's fa­ther fled from the home be­fore po­lice ar­rived at the scene last week to search for Han­nah's re­mains. He was cap­tured at a rel­a­tive's El Do­ra­do, Tu­na­puna apart­ment last Wednes­day night.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment on the lat­est de­vel­op­ment last night, one of­fi­cer they were con­cerned, as there were no mech­a­nisms that would com­pel the main sus­pect to re­main in one place if he po­lice were seek­ing to re-ar­rest him.

"It's not like bail con­di­tions where some­one who has al­ready been charged would be man­dat­ed to re­port to a po­lice sta­tion and check in or sign a reg­is­ter, the of­fi­cer said.

"In a sit­u­a­tion like this, the per­son has free reign to go wher­ev­er they like, for all we know he may even leave the ter­ri­to­ry and this is what we would have to deal with." - With re­port­ing by Bavi­ta Gopaulchan