State raises concerns over Hadeed house arrest during appeal hearing

The State has raised con­cerns about the re­sources re­quired to mon­i­tor busi­ness­man Do­minic Hadeed and his wife Genevieve while they re­main un­der house ar­rest as their ap­peal is be­ing con­sid­ered. The Hadeeds were or­dered re­leased on house ar­rest yes­ter­day by three ap­peal court judges but re­mained be­hind bars af­ter a late-night stay re­quest by at­tor­neys rep­re­sent­ing the State.

Dur­ing pro­ceed­ings in the High Court to­day, the State ar­gued that keep­ing the cou­ple un­der house ar­rest would re­quire sig­nif­i­cant re­sources to en­sure com­pli­ance with the con­di­tions im­posed.

The State raised con­cerns about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a plot be­ing con­tin­ued and said au­thor­i­ties would need to en­sure the Hadeeds did not have ac­cess to com­mu­ni­ca­tion de­vices.

It al­so point­ed to the cou­ple’s wa­ter­front res­i­dence, ar­gu­ing that peo­ple could vis­it them or they could leave the prop­er­ty with­out the po­lice be­ing aware.

The State said six po­lice of­fi­cers would be re­quired around the clock to mon­i­tor the cou­ple, cre­at­ing an ad­di­tion­al de­mand on po­lice re­sources.

The Hadeeds’ le­gal team main­tained that the court had al­ready ruled they were en­ti­tled to pur­sue their ap­peal while on un­con­di­tion­al re­lease.

Their at­tor­neys al­so chal­lenged claims made by Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der re­gard­ing calls in­volv­ing two in­di­vid­u­als.

The de­fence said af­fi­davits had been pro­vid­ed by the in­di­vid­u­als re­ferred to by Alexan­der, ex­plain­ing their con­nec­tion to the Hadeeds.

One af­fi­davit re­port­ed­ly con­firmed that one in­di­vid­ual was the se­cu­ri­ty guard as­signed to the Hadeeds, re­spon­si­ble for drop­ping off and pick­ing up their chil­dren.

The oth­er in­di­vid­ual was iden­ti­fied as the head of a non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion.

The pan­el of Ap­peal Court judges has since re­tired to de­lib­er­ate on the mat­ter.