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LIL WAYNE; JA RULE ARREST UPDATES: Rappers released on bond; each rep swears guns weren’t theirs.
*Rappers Lil Wayne and Ja Rule, both arrested Sunday in separate incidents following Wayne’s concert in New York, are out on bond and claiming that the guns found in their cases were not theirs.
According to their attorney Stacey Richman, Lil Wayne was released Monday evening on $70,000 bond and will appear in court again in November on a felony charge of gun-possession. He was arrested following his headlining show at New York’s Beacon Theatre.
Ja Rule, who features Lil Wayne on his current single, “Uh Oh,” was released on $150,000 bond and expected back in Manhattan Criminal Court on Nov. 7 to face a felony charge of criminal possession of a weapon. Both rappers spent Sunday night in jail.
Richman tells MTV News that both arrests seem a little suspect. As for Lil Wayne, “he was in the bus in his boxer shorts with a number of other people," she said. "Unless his boxer shorts had a pocket for this gun, I don't understand how he had it on him."
Richman's father and legal partner, Murray Richman, believes Lil Wayne’s arrest was a result of an action by New York's police-detective "hip-hop squad," which "staked out the [tour] bus," Richman told MTV.
Murray Richman added that the .40-caliber gun police found in Wayne’s tour bus was in the same area in which Wayne was changing clothes and was a legally registered handgun, but did not belong to the rapper.
Also, the attorneys are wondering why the other 12 to 20 people on the bus were not arrested along with Wayne, given New York laws requiring everyone in a vehicle with an unclaimed gun be charged if that vehicle is searched by police.
Prosecutors claim that as police approached the bus after smelling marijuana, the man later charged with marijuana possession allegedly flushed
7 ounces of the substance down the bus' toilet. The marijuana was retrieved and introduced into evidence.
In Ja Rule's case, Stacey Richman claims the .40-caliber Taurus pistol police recovered from inside the 2004 Maybach that Ja was riding in belonged to someone else. Ja; his driver, Mohamed Gamal; and his road manager, Dennis Cherry, were all charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
According to Richman, the car in question was a company vehicle owned by Gamal's Maximum Transportation firm and is used by his clients.
"If you get a car, and something's left in the car, is that yours?"
Richman wondered to MTV. "How you can ascribe that anybody knows what's in a car?"
She also says the car was stopped about a block away from the Beacon Theatre and that it had been "parked outside for two and a half hours, with the police department, and they ran the plates — they could have just handed out a ticket then, but they didn't. They waited for [Ja Rule] to get into the car."
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