Holiday to stand
trial on April 16
PHILIPSBURG--Suspended Windward Islands Police Chief Commissioner Derrick Holiday goes to court on Wednesday, April 16, to face charges of forgery, the Prosecutor’s Office confirmed Monday.
The former head of the St. Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius Police Force also has to defend himself against allegations of fraud for his reported signing of falsified documents, said Windward Islands Chief Prosecutor Taco Stein.
Holiday was arrested on February 5 and kept in police detention for three days before being released. During his time in custody, Federal Detectives grilled him about forged documents that bore his signature.
Holiday was the second in a trio of high-ranking officers arrested under suspicion of irregularities in the Immigration chain. It started with former head of Immigration Police Commissioner Marcel Loor being arrested last June, and ended with the recent 10-hour detention of Police Chief Inspector Alfred Marsdin, former Head of Immigration at Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA).
Stein said some of Loor’s statements would be used against Holiday, but that the former Immigration head had not specifically implicated his former boss. “Part of the statements of Mr. Loor will be used for Mr. Holiday,” Stein told The Daily Herald. “But his statements were not specifically geared towards tarnishing Mr. Holiday.”
Loor was convicted in November of accepting bribes and misusing his post, and was sentenced to four years behind bars – in Curaçao.
Holiday, who had been removed from his post by order of the Minister of Justice three days ahead of his arrest, maintained his innocence following the arrest, with his lawyer Joeri Essed crying foul at high-level justice officials. At the beginning of the case, when attorney Denicio Brison represented Holiday, their defence was that the top cop had never knowingly signed fraudulent documents.
Marsdin was released after almost half a day of questioning by Federal Detectives and insisted he had done “nothing wrong” while at airport Immigration. He defended himself and Holiday, saying that they were being made scapegoats in unfounded investigations to keep them quiet, at least in his case.
