Three men charged in the 2023 beating death of a restaurant owner in Owen Sound, Ont., remain in custody in the U.K. as their extradition case winds its way through the justice system.
Robert Evans, 24, has been charged with manslaughter and Robert Busby Evans, 47, and Barry Evans, 54, with accessory after the fact in the Sharif Rahman case, Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and Owen Sound city police said Wednesday.
“Three men, aged 54, 47 and 24, have been arrested in the Edinburgh and Dalkeith areas in connection with an outstanding international warrant,” a Police Scotland spokesperson told CBC News on Thursday. “Officers from Police Scotland are liaising with the relevant authorities.”
The three accused were in Canada on visitor visas and left the country shortly after the August 2023 attack, OPP Det. Insp. Jane Conway, the lead investigator, has said.
Rahman, 44, a husband and father of a young daughter, was attacked on Aug. 17, 2023, outside The Curry House in downtown Owen Sound and later died in a London, Ont., hospital. Police and a witness said it happened during a dispute over an unpaid dining bill totalling approximately $150.
3 accused men reportedly related
It’s believed the youngest man is the son of the 47-year-old and the nephew of the 54-year-old, BBC reports. Two of the men were arrested in July and the third in October.
Given it’s been months since the first two were arrested, it’s likely they’re fighting extradition, said international law expert Robert Currie.
More than a year after a well-known restaurateur in Owen Sound, Ont., was killed in a dine-and-dash that rocked the community, police have charged three men from the United Kingdom.
“The big question is if these individuals resist extradition,” said Currie, a law professor at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University who specializes in international and transnational criminal law but isn’t connected with the case.
“They could voluntarily surrender themselves to come to Canada, but it’s not unusual to resist extradition.”
The men’s lawyers could argue there are special circumstances that prevent them from leaving the U.K., such as illness, Currie said. Others have argued that conditions in Canadian jails are overcrowded and could violate their human rights, he added.
Contesting extradition is often a way to stay longer in the country where one is and to put off a trial, said Joanna Harrington, a human rights and international law expert from the University of Alberta.
“When contesting extradition, an individual might well raise human rights-related arguments, but past cases indicate how few of these are successful,” Harrington said. “The individual would have to show that there is in Canada a real risk of a violation of the right to be free from torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment to establish a successful bar to extradition.”
The BBC also reports the men remain in custody awaiting their extradition hearings.
Some portions of extradition proceedings are not public because they involve international talks, Currie said.
“I have always said the process is unnecessarily secretive,” he said. “I get that they can’t be releasing diplomatic relations, but they are also a little too tight with the facts.”