The Tribune

By LETRE SWEETING

Tribune Staff Reporter

lsweeting@tribunemedia.net

FOREIGN Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell said Italian authorities had given their Bahamian counterparts the investigative file on two Bahamian men who died suspiciously in Italy three years ago, bringing local investigators closer to a conclusion about what happened.

The bodies of Alrae Ramsey, 29, a foreign service officer, and Dr Blair John, 28, a student at Saint Mary’s University, were pulled from the River Po in Turin, Italy, on June 4th and 5th, 2019, after the men had been missing for several days.

An autopsy said their deaths were likely the result of accidental drowning, but the circumstances have long confounded people familiar with the men. John’s mother, for example, insisted her son was a good swimmer.

In 2021, lawyers representing the government applied to get the Italian government’s file on the deaths.

However, the judge refused to release the file, deciding the Bahamian government had no standing. The judge said the court would review a request from relatives of the men.

Consequently, the families applied to an Italian judge last month to obtain the investigation file.

Mr Mitchell said that although the file has been released, more information is needed.

“There are some additional things, which they have promised to do,” he said. “There is an application before them now to deal with mainly digital aspects of the file and some video inputs, so we’re awaiting that before we can have a final discussion with the family as to what the next steps ought to be.”

“The other thing is that all the files are in Italian,” he said, “so we have to have a formal translation into English. So that is what is going on now with the electronic file.”

When asked how long he expects the Italian government to take to provide the additional information, Mr Mitchell said: “It should be shortly. We were assured that it wouldn’t be an issue.”

Last month, Mr Mitchell said officials’ findings could trigger a local Coroner’s Court inquest.

“If something of this nature happened within The Bahamas, we could’ve had a coroner’s inquest where all of the facts would be examined and a jury asked to make a determination on what happened,” he said.

“So the question is whether or not something like this, a coroner’s inquest, can be done. There may be some indications that we may have to amend the law to do that, because, of course, the deaths took place outside the jurisdiction, so that’s a matter on which I stand to be advised.

“But even if you don’t go to the level of a coroner’s inquest, it may be that the public officials here, that is the police who are in charge of investigations, having a second or third look at this might be able to spot something (and) go over the evidence with the families and the families may be satisfied as a result of that process.”