TURIN - The Bahamas have sent a team including a former police commissioner turned ambassador to Italy to monitor the Italian investigation into the mysterious deaths of a young Bahamian diplomat and his friend whose corpses were fished out of the river Po last week.

 The nation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Ellison Greenslade, Ambassador to the United Kingdom and former police official, will lead a team of officials headed to Turin to monitor police progress on the investigation, which has so far been heavily criticised by the Caribbean nation.

 The move follows the lack of developments in investigations into the deaths of Alrae Keiorn Ramsey, a 29-year-old assistant at the Bahamas Embassy in Milan, and his longstanding friend Blair Randy John, a 28-year-old Ph.D student at St Mary’s University in London. The two Bahamian men were found in the Po a couple of days after they were last seen in the city.

 The two had a series of cuts to their faces, but doctors attributed the wounds to the falls that would have seen both men end up in the river. No further signs of violence to the body initially led investigators to seemingly rule out the possibility of a double homicide and attribute their deaths to suicide or having drowned, despite incongruous evidence raising a number of questions.

 This hypothesis was quickly rebuffed by those close to Ramsey and John, as well as Bahamian nationals more widely. John’s mother told news sources that the likelihood that they had drowned after accidentally falling in the river was slim given her son “was an expert swimmer,” while others pointed at the question marks hanging over the case.

 Police have still been unable to explain why the suitcases of the two victims were stashed in a rubbish bin a few hundred metres from where the two are thought to have fallen in the river, while the mystery surrounding a third man who investigators believe Ramsey and John were on their way to meet is yet to be solved.

 Statements from the holiday apartment where the two were staying also cast further doubts on the case. Staff revealed that the room they had been living in was found in pristine condition, as if it had been untouched, and also disclosed that the apartment had been booked by a third individual, a friend of Ramsey and John’s, who had seemingly been unable to join them in Turin.   

 Investigators are still waiting on the autopsy results, as well as a string of tests that it is hoped will reveal if the two men were under the influence of alcohol or hallucinogenic drugs at the time of their deaths, which they hope will shed further light on the events.

  jp-ea