Hurst: Keoma’s claim is because ‘She can’t have any more children’

4
67
- Advertisement -

“The only reason, 15 years later, that she’s making this claim is because… she can’t have anymore children.”

This was the conclusion of a audibly upset government spokesman, Lionel “Max” Hurst as to why Guyanese national, Keoma Hamer, has been making allegations of abduction and human trafficking of her twin baby daughters, 15 years now removed from her admittance to the Holberton Hospital.

Last week Friday, the Government of Antigua and Barbuda (GOAB), through a media statement, denounced claims made by Hamer stating the, “investigative expertise of law enforcement is being deployed to determine if there could be any evidence to support her claim, which is debunked by the evidence presented thus far.”

“That woman has made a claim against nurses and decent people in Antigua and Barbuda who, she says, committed a crime and they did not commit a crime,” said Hurst.

The spokesman pointed to the results of a recently-conducted DNA test that he said showed, “definitely that she is the daughter of these two people [Ester Amos and O’Neil Burley].”

Hurst also made reference to a 2004 report by attending physician Dr. Joseph John which concluded that Hamer had a “spontaneous abortion”. This, Hurst said, means that the children Hamer carried for 28 weeks, “were not birthed.”

“She was so sick, she suffered from sepsis… her feces was bleeding into her bloodstream. You cannot deliver healthy children when such a thing is happening to you,” he added.

The government’s statement referred to Hamer as “a person unknown to Antigua and Barbuda”.

This reference did not sit well with the president of the Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy (CGID), Rickford Burke, who classed it as a “dehumanization of someone experiencing trauma”.

Hurst said, however, “she is unknown, a completely unknown person. That is a statement of fact. That is not judgement.”

He continued that, “you think that [the government] is going to stand idly by and let Burke and that lady from St Martin say ugly things about Antigua and about those two innocent women at the hospital… and don’t say anything at all? What are we? Stupid?”

In June this year, Hamer’s abduction allegations went viral after she called on the authorities of Antigua and Barbuda to investigate what happened on September 7, 2004 when she allegedly delivered her babies on the Gwynneth O’Reilly Ward of the old Holberton Hospital.

“We are going to defend against scurrilous attacks by people like this woman in St Martin whose life we saved and who’s now repaying us by making some of the ugliest claims you can find. This thing is all over the world!,” the government spokesman exclaimed.

- Advertisement -