Demolition at a historic Tucker’s Town cemetery, faulted in an Ombudsman’s report last year, cannot be blamed on the Department of Planning or the Bermuda Government, Home Affairs Minister Michael Fahy said yesterday.

Senator Fahy said the cemetery had already been zoned a Historical Protection Area when tombstones and a perimeter wall at the Marsden Methodist Memorial Cemetery at Tucker’s Point were knocked down in October 2012.

Two years later, on the advice of the Historic Builds Advisory Committee, the site was designated a Historic Monument.

Ombudsman Victoria Pearman, in a recent report, said the Ministry and Department had a part to play “for which they must account”, but Sen Fahy said the “devastating event” had been “a separate damaging action on the part of others, at least one of whom was fully aware of the protective zoning of the site”.

He said the zoning of a development plan could not prevent “poor judgment and bad behaviour on the part of those determined upon a particular course of action”, in which Planning had not taken part.

Sen Fahy also disputed Ms Pearman’s assertion that Planning should take the lead in determining the next step for the site, calling it an enforcement matter on which they were waiting direction from Marsden Church, and said he believed Planning had been made a “scapegoat”.

In a June 16 letter to Ms Pearman, Planning director Aideen Ratteray Pryse wrote that they could not be faulted, and it was up to the church to decide how to rectify the matter.