Mauritius PM Says Missing Phone Was With Police Six Years After Death

Mauritius Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam told Parliament on October 27 that a mobile phone missing from the investigation into the 2020 death of political party agent Soopramanien Kistnen had been found in police possession, six years after the death. The device is being examined, he said. His account is recorded in the National Assembly's official, unrevised Hansard for Debate No. 30 of 2026, and was separately reported by local newsrooms.

Kistnen's body was found in October 2020. Ramgoolam told lawmakers that investigators expected him to have two phones. One, recovered from beneath the burned body, had initially been considered unusable, but British specialists subsequently extracted information from it, according to the prime minister. The other had remained missing. The parliamentary transcript records Ramgoolam saying that investigators eventually located it with police, where it had been described in a way that did not identify it as a phone. That description is a statement by the prime minister, not an independent forensic finding published by TFNOS.

The prime minister was answering a priority parliamentary question from opposition leader Chetan Baboolall. Ramgoolam said British investigators had identified serious shortcomings in the original investigation, including evidence not preserved and investigative avenues not followed. He reported that experts considered the death a homicide rather than an accident or suicide. The underlying specialist report has not been independently reviewed for this article, and the remarks do not identify a perpetrator or establish individual criminal responsibility.

Ramgoolam said no arrests had been made in the reopened death investigation as of October 27. He also said investigators had recorded 17 statements from 12 people in a related inquiry into the so-called Kistnen Papers concerning emergency pandemic procurement. He reported £78,000 paid to the foreign investigators to date. The prime minister said no file had yet been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions for possible prosecution, although prosecutors were advising investigators.

Independent outlet Le Mauricien reported the parliamentary disclosure on October 27, including the discovery of the second device and the absence of arrests. Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation also reported the new evidence and the prime minister's comments on deficiencies in earlier evidence handling. These are accounts of the public parliamentary statement, not independent confirmation of where the phone was kept for the entire six years.

The immediate accountability questions are whether police inventory records can explain the phone's original classification, what forensic examination has established, and whether investigators or prosecutors have made any subsequent decisions. None of those unresolved questions is evidence that a particular officer deliberately concealed the device. TFNOS will check official court, police and parliamentary updates before reporting any new allegation or development.

Official parliamentary source: Mauritius National Assembly, *Debate No. 30 of 2026 (unrevised)*, 27 October 2026, pp. 11–13: https://mauritiusassembly.govmu.org/mauritiusassembly/index.php/download/482/2026/27217/debate-no-30-of-2026-unrevised-tuesday-27-october-2026.pdf