Former cop accused in Suriname murder to remain in jail, rules court in The Hague

The former police officer suspected of violently murdering 48-year-old Rishi Parmesar in Suriname at the end of December 2022 was ordered to remain in pre-trial detention during a hearing in the District Court of The Hague on Monday. Romeo B., now 50 years old, denied the accusations against him, and is struggling to understand “how he ended up in this nightmare,” his attorneys said.

B. is said to have murdered the Hoofddorp resident together with a co-suspect by hitting him on the head with a metal pipe and slitting his throat. The deadly violence is said to have been committed on a commercial property the victim held in Lelydorp, south of the Surinamese capital Paramaribo.

Parmesar was supposed to travel back to the Netherlands from Suriname on on December 18, 2022, the day he was killed. He never made it to his flight, and seemingly disappeared from the face of the planet that day.

No trace of Parmesar has been found. The authorities in Suriname have officially declared him dead. “The fact that there is no body makes it an extremely complex case,” the prosecutor said in the courtroom in The Hague on Monday. Police and prosecutors in the Netherlands are still investigating B.’s role in the murder. The former police officer was arrested in his hometown of The Hague in mid-January.

In Suriname, the investigation into the co-suspect has reached an advanced stage. Prosecutors in the capital of Paramaribo recommended a 30 prison sentence against him in December. He has also made statements implicating B. in the crime. B.'s lawyers claimed that Dutch investigators think the man is lying.

Prosecutors in the Netherlands think B. has acted "very calculatingly" in crafting his own statements. The victim is rumored to have been owed B. money, but little has been proven about a possible motive because the suspect has consistently denied any involvement.

A delegation of Dutch investigators will likely travel to Suriname early this summer to reconstruct the crime scene. A next hearing will be held in the District Court in The Hague on July 18.