HARD cop Reneto Adams and six of his men from the disbanded Crime Management Unit (CMU) yesterday snubbed a session at which they were to be interrogated by Jamaican and Scotland Yard detectives for the Crawle killings in May.

In letters to the investigating officer, Assistant Commissioner of Police Osbourne Dyer, lawyers for the group said that they would not attend any interviews involving the British police officers.

“They were informed that they were being investigated as suspects and in light of this will not be meeting with Scotland Yard to do any interviews, interrogation or question and answer,” a source close to the group told the Observer yesterday.

However, there were suggestions at the weekend that at least two of Adams’ former CMU colleagues were prepared to turn Crown witnesses, but this could not be confirmed.

Adams, a senior superintendent, has all along signalled that a boycott of any Scotland Yard interview would be his stance, especially after it emerged that he and his men could possibly face murder charges for the killing of four persons, including two women, in what was previously held to be a quiet Clarendon community.

The basis of Adams’ position was his apparent sense of betrayal by the police force and the fact that officers from Scotland Yard, or England’s Metropolitan Police, have no legal jurisdiction in Jamaica.

He and others have also claimed that their positions have been prejudiced by public officials, including police chief, Francis Forbes, security minister, Peter Phillips and Jamaica Labour Party parliamentarian, Pearnel Charles.

“After the incident Commissioner Forbes said he would not support policemen who go around and murder people Rambo-style,” said a former CMU member. “Minister Phillips told a group of police graduands that they should not be judge, jury and executioner and Pearnel Charles called them cold-blooded murderers. In light of this, we are of the view that we have been highly prejudiced and did not attend (the interview).”

Established in 2000, on the back of a crime wave in Jamaica, Adams’ CMU was to take on gangs, inner-city crime dons and what was then a growing incidence of car-jackings.

Colourful, talkative and with a penchant for the limelight, Adams and his CMU were soon involved in a spate of controversial shootings, including the March 2001 killing of seven youths in Braeton, Portmore, in what the police insisted was a gunfight.

Critics and human rights groups called the Braeton incident extra-judicial killings, although a coroner’s inquest, by majority vote, held no one was criminally responsible for the deaths.

The relationship between Adams and his superiors continued to deteriorate and finally snapped after the Crawle case. The CMU members said they went in search of an alleged St Catherine hardcase, Bassington Douglas, also known as Chen Chen, who was wanted for murder and extortion.

According to the police’s version of the incident, the CMU team came under fire from a small house in the area. They returned the fire and when the shooting ended they found four persons with gunshot wounds, including two women, one of whom was Chen Chen’s girlfriend. The police said a shotgun and a pistol were recovered from the dead men.

However, people in the community claimed that there was not shoot-out and the occupants of the house were executed.

Under pressure from human rights critics, the police chief, Francis Forbes, assigned Dyer to head the probe in the killings and invited Scotland Yard to help, going over ground previously traversed by local police.

In the aftermath of Crawle, Forbes disbanded the CMU and assigned Adams to a desk job — a decision that the former CMU head first learned of in the press. Adams has unsuccessfully attempted in court to overturn Forbes’ decision.

According to highly-placed police sources, a full report from Scotland Yard detectives, apparently including forensic information from samples sent to Britain, should be ready by next week.

But it was not clear how this would be affected by yesterday’s decision by Adams and his men not to meet with the investigators.

Despite the controversy Adams appears to have maintained his popularity that was apparent in earlier opinion polls.

There have been several public calls for his return to tackle a recent rise in killings, although Forbes has argued that there was no improvement in crime statistics during the life of the CMU.