Court upholds detention of alleged “main shooter” during 2025 SoE

The High Court has dis­missed a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge brought by De­nesh Ma­haraj, who claimed his week-long de­ten­tion dur­ing the 2025 State of Emer­gency was un­law­ful.

Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad ruled that po­lice act­ed rea­son­ably and pro­por­tion­ate­ly when they is­sued a Fur­ther De­ten­tion Or­der af­ter of­fi­cers re­port­ed find­ing a firearm and nar­cotics at Ma­haraj’s home.

The State of Emer­gency was de­clared on Ju­ly 18, 2025, by Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo, fol­low­ing in­tel­li­gence about a co­or­di­nat­ed crim­i­nal net­work op­er­at­ing with­in the na­tion’s pris­ons. Au­thor­i­ties said the net­work was or­ches­trat­ing at­tacks against se­nior of­fi­cials and na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions.

On Sep­tem­ber 25, 2025, po­lice in­ter­cept­ed Ma­haraj at an NP gas sta­tion in St He­le­na. While Ma­haraj main­tained that no il­le­gal items were found on him at the time, As­sis­tant Su­per­in­ten­dent of Po­lice (Ag.) An­tho­ny St Clair told the court that a sub­se­quent search of Ma­haraj’s home un­cov­ered a Venezue­lan mil­i­tary-marked pis­tol, two mag­a­zines, 22 rounds of am­mu­ni­tion and a quan­ti­ty of cannabis.

St Clair al­so gave ev­i­dence that he re­ceived in­tel­li­gence iden­ti­fy­ing Ma­haraj as a “main shoot­er” for the Re­sis­tance Gang and that he was al­leged­ly plan­ning fur­ther shoot­ings. He au­tho­rised a sev­en-day ex­ten­sion of Ma­haraj’s de­ten­tion, cit­ing the com­plex­i­ty of in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to kid­nap­ping, mur­der and gang ac­tiv­i­ty.

Ma­haraj, through his at­tor­neys, ar­gued that he was nev­er told he was be­ing de­tained un­der emer­gency pow­ers and that no ac­tive in­ter­views were con­duct­ed while he was held at the Freeport Po­lice Sta­tion.

How­ev­er, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad found that po­lice were en­ti­tled to take “un­con­ven­tion­al” steps giv­en the se­ri­ous­ness of the in­tel­li­gence. He al­so point­ed to what he de­scribed as a “lack of can­dour” by Ma­haraj, not­ing that he did not dis­close the al­leged dis­cov­ery of the firearm and drugs when he first ap­plied to bring the claim.

“This tem­po­rary dis­com­fort is the price which has to be paid to en­sure that the Re­pub­lic re­mains a func­tion­al democ­ra­cy in which peace and good or­der is pre­served.”