The jury in the Nigel Christian murder trial will begin deliberations on Monday after sitting through four closing speeches on Wednesday — one from the prosecution and one from each of three defence attorneys — that offered starkly opposing accounts of what happened on July 10, 2020, and who was truly responsible.

Saleim Harrigan, Wayne Thomas, and Lasean Bully are accused of abducting the senior Customs official from his McKinnons home at gunpoint and shooting him dead on a dirt road in Thibou’s that same afternoon. All three have pleaded not guilty.

Director of Public Prosecutions Clement Joseph told the jury the case was straightforward: a man was unlawfully and intentionally killed, and the evidence — DNA, cellular mapping data, and the account of a key witness who drove the accused that day — pointed squarely at the three men before them. Joseph defended the key witness against the defence’s attacks on his credibility, acknowledged the driver’s own admitted role in transporting the men, and dismissed the suggestion that police had manufactured evidence. “Antigua police is the slackest police on this earth if they are going to plant evidence and not fill it up with DNA,” he said. He also brushed aside what he characterised as an endless stream of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories from the defence, summing it up in three words: “Agriculture. Agriculture. Agriculture.”

All three defence attorneys converged on the same central argument — that the key witness was a liar who had traded the freedom of three innocent men for his own — but each pressed different pressure points. Wendel Alexander, counsel for Harrigan, urged the jury to ask who truly had a motive to kill Christian, a customs officer who had been investigating fraud at the time of his death. He catalogued suspicious circumstances surrounding the driver, questioned the reliability of the cell tower evidence, and called the overall effort a “dry bones investigation.”

Michael Archibald, counsel for Bully, described the prosecution’s case as a puzzle with too many missing pieces — no DNA from Christian on the bag said to belong to him, no forensic trace of the accused in the vehicles they allegedly travelled in, and no satisfactory explanation for why police, who he said had advance knowledge of a plot against Christian, did nothing to protect him. “The story is the box and the evidence is the pieces of the puzzle — pieces are missing,” he told the jury.

Sherfield Bowen, counsel for Thomas, was the most forceful, calling key evidence “a lie from the chambers of hell” and suggesting the investigation had been deliberately steered away from the truth. He questioned the circumstances under which the Perry Bay evidence entered the case, noted that a senior officer who had questioned the driver as a suspect was subsequently removed from the investigation, and pointed out that a well-known businessman named as having ordered the killing was never charged. “They don’t want the truth,” he told the jury. Closing his address, he asked: “When the protector becomes a predator, from whence are we going to be protected?”

Justice Rajiv Persaud will sum up the case before the jury retires on Monday.