At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anil Nand­lall is de­fend­ing the de­ci­sion to es­tab­lish a Com­mis­sion of In­quiry in­to the MV Bari­ma tragedy that left 72 peo­ple dead and more than 30 oth­ers miss­ing and pre­sumed dead when the ves­sel cap­sized on Ju­ly 18.

Speak­ing on his week­ly “Is­sues in the News” pro­gramme on Tues­day night, Nand­lall was al­so crit­i­cal of op­po­si­tion politi­cians in­clud­ing the leader of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Con­gress (PNC), Aubrey Nor­ton, whom were op­po­si­tion the ef­forts at get­ting to the bot­tom of the tragedy in keep­ing with “ their tra­di­tion­al and his­tor­i­cal ap­proach on these mat­ters.

“You check at any time in Guyana’s his­to­ry, you will al­ways see that they are nev­er on the side of the law en­force­ment agen­cies…they are nev­er on the side of vic­tims of crime. They are al­ways on the the oth­er side,” he said,, re­call­ing the po­si­tion of the op­po­si­tion fol­low­ing the prison out­break in 2001 “when they em­braced those per­sons who were go­ing around slaugh­ter­ing peo­ple, rob­bing Guyanese, killing peo­ple”.