Judge overturns successful bail application for Carroll
Former Economic Affairs Officer at the US Embassy, Thomas Carroll, was denied pre-trial freedom again yesterday by a US district court in Chicago. On Wednesday, according to Randall Samborn of the US Attorney's Officer, Carroll had been granted bail in the sum of US$500,000 by a federal magistrate, with extensive conditions which included among other things confinement to his parents' home in Palos Hills, a Chicago suburb, and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. However, Samborn said that the District Attorney successfully applied for a stay of the implementation of the bail order and yesterday the District Judge who will try Carroll's case accepted the argument that he should continue to be held without bail. Carroll's next appearance in court will be on June 19. Samborn said that no date has been set for Carroll's trial and that his lawyers have indicated that he was likely to plead guilty to the charges at some point before the charges are tried. However, he said that at this time there was no guarantee that he would do so. Meanwhile, Carroll's alleged accomplice in the visa sale scam, Halim Khan, a West Coast Demerara spare parts dealer and restaurant owner is due to appear in court next Friday, also for a status hearing. He has made no further application for bail. Samborn said that the investigation into the charges was still ongoing and not all of the information gathered by the prosecution had been released. Among this information are the names of the two police officers, US Justice Department lawyers claim were involved with Carroll in the visa sale ring. Locally, police officials are tight-lipped about the investigation in which a task force is assisting the US embassy in ascertaining the range and scope of Carroll's activities. The embassy in March had suspended the issue of non-immigrant visa to allow the investigation into Carroll's activities to proceed. In the process, it had issued advisories to the airlines plying the Guyana-US route that it had revoked the visas of a number of persons and warned against them being allowed to board flights to the US. They also questioned Khan's wife and Eton Cordis a former employee at the US embassy. They were both released on $50,000 bail and ordered to report weekly to the police. Carroll and Khan are charged with visa fraud, bribery and producing false visas in relation to sale of non-immigrant visas. They were both arrested on March 17; Khan in Miami as he was about to board a plane back to Guyana and Carroll outside his parents' home in a Chicago suburb. Carroll's relatives, when he first appeared in court, had offered to put up some US$550,000 in assets to secure his pre-trial release but the prosecution opposed his release on the ground that he would pose a danger to government witnesses and their families. At that hearing, they had played tape recordings of Carroll threatening violence against a co-worker if the visa sale ring was exposed. The threat was taped by the co-worker who had taken over from Carroll as head of the embassy's non-immigrant visa section and was cooperating with the federal authorities in building a case against Carroll. Carroll had allegedly recruited the co-worker to participate in the sale of non-immigrant visas and was paying him US$4,000 for each visa he issued for Carroll.
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