Hours before a bombshell TV interview with cop killer Jasmine Hartin aired on Thursday night, a remarkable video emerged online.
It showed the gregarious 32-year-old blonde, wearing a black swimsuit and very short shorts, blasting watermelons on an idyllic Belize beach with a pump-action shotgun, then pretending to blow smoke from the barrel.
Separate new footage also showed her clambering onto a saddle suspended from a ceiling during a party.
Hours before a bombshell TV interview with cop killer Jasmine Hartin aired on Thursday night, a remarkable video emerged online
The timing hardly seemed coincidental. Miss Hartin’s interview with the local Belize station 7 News was intended to put forward her side of the story, and settle scores with her partner Andrew Ashcroft, son of the Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft.
Miss Hartin has always claimed she had shot a respected Belizean police chief accidentally as they sat at the end of a jetty after a night of heavy drinking in late May.
Many may now feel the new ‘watermelon’ footage shows that she knows how to handle a gun.
It’s the latest twist in an extraordinary tale that has gripped this tiny Central American nation.
To many ordinary Belizeans, Jasmine Hartin was just another spoilt and wealthy expat who more than deserved to be in her predicament.
After all, she has not denied shooting dead her friend Superintendent Henry Jemmott just over a month ago. And when prosecutors charged her with only the relatively minor offence of manslaughter by negligence, many were outraged by what they saw as near-colonial-era corruption.
It showed the gregarious 32-year-old blonde, wearing a black swimsuit and very short shorts, blasting watermelons on an idyllic Belize beach with a pump-action shotgun, then pretending to blow smoke from the barrel
Yet following her TV appearance — and despite the watermelon footage — some may now have a sneaking sympathy for her.
For, as she emotionally relayed, ever since the police superintendent’s death she has been sucked into a downward spiral of events that she says have allegedly deprived her of her money, home and even her two young children.
Once she flitted between smart restaurants and glitzy parties. But of late she has been dividing her time between scorpion-infested prisons and cramped police cells.
And where home used to be a beachfront villa in the resort of San Pedro, where an army of staff attended to her every need, the Canadian — now on bail — reportedly shares a modest Airbnb with her mother on the less fashionable, landlocked side of the country.
During her jaw-dropping interview — which inevitably will have infuriated the Ashcroft family, who have decades-old ties to the former British colony — Miss Hartin accused Andrew, 42, of exploiting her incarceration and emotional state to persuade her to give up her stake in their business.
She claimed he had sent a letter to her via a friend on the night of May 31 — three days after her arrest — and provided a copy to 7 News that was shown on air.
Miss Hartin (right) accused Andrew, 42, (left) of exploiting her incarceration and emotional state to persuade her to give up her stake in their business
‘I was in the San Pedro police station after a magistrate had denied me bail,’ she explained.
‘I was clearly upset and stressed out, and Andrew had sent a letter with a mutual friend to meet me in the males’ bathroom at the front of the police station to sign a one-paragraph statement that says: “I, Jasmine Hartin, sign all shares in Kidd Estates Ltd, which is 10 per cent, to Andrew Ashcroft for the sum of $1 a share.” ’ She said she had signed the statement, but has not received any compensation.
Miss Hartin claimed she was told that if she didn’t sign, hotel giant Marriott would rescind its franchise agreement to let her and Andrew run their luxury boutique hotel, the Alaia.
This, she said, would mean ‘everything we’d worked for was going to be taken away’.
She went on: ‘All I thought was: “We built this for our kids, we’ve worked so hard to get this, so I’ll sign it over but I’m sure he’ll make sure I get it back.” But it wasn’t right to sign it at that time, under those pressures.’
A source who knows the couple told the Mail that Andrew and Jasmine split up some time ago — in part because of his refusal to marry her (although, under Belize common law, they are considered married) — but had stayed together for appearances’ sake.
Following her release on bail after Superintendent Jemmott’s death, Jasmine was re-arrested last week. She had stormed into the Alaia to confront Andrew over not being able to see their four-year-old twins. She allegedly assaulted a member of staff (she denies this) before posting footage of the incident on social media.
She revealed to 7 News that she’d had previous custody battles with Andrew, one in 2018. ‘It was a very, very bad time in our relationship.’
She took the children to Canada to visit family and stayed for two-and-a-half months, although their father ‘wasn’t denied visitation’ and came to see them.
She said she returned to Belize because she felt they ‘owed it to the children to make it work’.
Mr Ashcroft’s alleged refusal to let his former partner see their children is just one puzzling aspect of this saga.
For as Miss Hartin’s new Belizean lawyer, Richard ‘Dickie’ Bradley, stressed this week, under local law a single mother has sole custody of her children, with the father having visitation rights and a responsibility to pay maintenance.
It has been alleged that Miss Hartin has been threatened with losing her children, although that didn’t come up in the TV interview.
Becoming tearful, she went on: ‘Withholding a mother from her children when we have nothing on custody in writing — I don’t know of another situation where they’ve done this to a mother: taken the children and put up a blockade of security guards to keep
