19 December 2023 :

Justice Sandil Kissoon of the High Court in Guyana on December 14, 2023 sentenced five men to death for the 2016 piracy attack that claimed the lives of four fishermen.
Justice Kissoon said that the five convicted men – Leon Sammy, Ganesh Naidoo, Ramesh Singh, Ramchand Latchman and Stephon Leacock – had engaged in a homicidal rampage involving piracy, hijacking, and robbery on the specified days.
They all pleaded guilty to murdering Hemchand Sookdeo, 45, Dochan Sukra, 54, Dhanpaul Ramphal, 38, and Munish Churman, 26, during May 27-28, 2016, in the waters of the Lower Shell area off Nickerie, Suriname.
According to reports, he delivered the death sentence, declaring, “Each of you is hereby sentenced to suffer death in a manner prescribed by law on each count in the indictment.”
Reports are that the captain of the boat Seepersaud Persaud, and his four crew members found themselves in a challenging situation as they navigated the open sea.
They were attacked by the accused and were cast overboard.
The sequence of events began with the assailants hurling Sookdeo, who was injured and bleeding, into the water. 
Subsequently, the remaining three fishermen were bound and fastened to anchors before being cast into the water.
Reports are that the criminals absconded with fishermen’s catch for the day, fuel, and other equipment.
Sookdeo was rescued by another vessel after swimming for almost three hours.
Days later, acting on received intelligence, law enforcement authorities converged on the foreshore of No. 65 Village, Corentyne, where they encountered a vessel closely matching the description of the one implicated in the piracy assault.
The five individuals on board the vessel were apprehended and subsequently faced charges.

06 February 2023 :

A Guyanese court on 31 January 2023 handed down death sentences for two men found guilty of high seas piracy attacks that killed seven fishermen off the nation’s coast in 2018, and authorities said they have broken the back of a deadly group that preyed on fishermen for years.
Nakool Manohar, 45, and Premnauth Persaud, 48, were convicted of masterminding an attack on a group of fishing vessels in waters near the neighboring South American country of Suriname in a row over access to prime fishing grounds.
Seven fishermen perished, while about a dozen others were rescued after drifting on the waters for days.
Police said some of the men were thrown overboard with their hands tied or weighed down with boat batteries. Others were reportedly chopped with machetes or burned with hot engine oil and tossed into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Sentencing the men on 31 January after a jury returned guilty verdicts, Justice Navindra Singh described the attacks as heinous, saying he found “no reason not to impose the death sentence."
“It would be reckless and irresponsible of the court to allow them to be released into society at any time,” the judge said.
He called their actions “gruesome, heinous and cold-blooded” as he imposed death by hanging.
The men can appeal the ruling to the local court of appeals and also to the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice, which is the final court for Guyana. Their lawyer declined to comment 2 February on their plans.
While death by hanging is still on local law books, no one has been hanged in Guyana since 1997 and authorities have made no effort to enforce death sentences imposed by courts. More than a dozen people are on death row in Guyana, some sentenced as far back as two decades ago.
Authorities have so far resisted lobbying efforts from the European Union and other international rights groups to scrub hanging from the law books. In some cases, appeal courts have commuted sentences to life in prison as those on death row simply bide their time behind bars.