…escape with over $1M in cash, fuel
…shoots at businessman, family jumps overboard
Armed bandits last week attacked a mobile shop that sells grocery, household items and fuel in the upper Berbice River, and carted off in excess of $1 million in cash and fuel.
Randolph Gladstone, his wife and daughter
The businessman who operates the shop, 56-year-old Randolph Gladstone, and his family had to jump into the Berbice River after gunmen shot indiscriminately at them.
This attack was reportedly carried out on the MV Anita at Henrietta, some 85 miles up the Berbice River.
“They carry away all our gasoline and diesel, so we had to wait until we get help to bring we down,” he told Guyana Times on Saturday, when asked why the robbery was not reported earlier.
According to the businessman, at about 03:00h last Friday, he heard someone knocking, asking for gasoline.
“The voice was rough, and I get suspicious. When I look through the wheelhouse windscreen I couldn’t see anybody, and the person keep demanding that they want gas.”
The businessman said he removed from the windscreen and heard a loud explosion almost immediately after.
“The glass window break and the shot put a big hole in the roof. The bullet pass right where I was, and then they start hitting the door to break it.”
Gladstone said several gunshots were fired at the door.
“Me, my wife and daughter inside the cabin, and they outside on the deck shooting the door,” he recounted.
He said he instructed his family to go to the lower deck, and he then followed. However, the bandits had by then removed the glass from the shattered wheelhouse windscreen and entered the cabin.
“The trap door don’t have a bolt, so I had to hold it with a rope and then some of them on the outside trying to open the side window, so I holding the trap door with one hand and the window with the other, and I tell my wife to go down to the back,” he detailed.
As shots continued to ring out, Gladstone said, he continued to hold on to the door and window with all his might. “Then I feel diesel running down on my skin and they tell me if I don’t open the door they gon burn the boat.”
Mrs Gladstone said that she managed to escape and hide. “I slide open the door and roll out and get away and reach in the bush and hide,” she related. She explained that she went about sixty metres into the thick vegetation lining the Berbice River.
“I crawl through the mud and reach by the trees, and then I go and hide,” she explained.
“I slide open the door and she roll out and then jump in the water, and then I go out and jump in the river. The place was black, you could barely see,” the businessman related.
His twenty-two-year-old daughter, said she was in the cold murky water trying to be as quiet as possible when a spotlight came on her.
“They make me keep my head down and two of them had guns and tell me they gon kill me if I don’t come back to the boat, and then two of them pull me up and tell me to carry them and give them the money,” she detailed.
According to the young lady, she was taken to the cabin and had to search to find money from the family’s business; but she handed it over to the bandits.
“They still keep searching, but it was all the money I give them,” she related.
The men also took gasoline, diesel and other valuables.
Mrs Gladstone said she heard a boat taking off and she then came to the shore and called for her husband and daughter, but only got a response from Rushell, who was on deck.
Police were able to remove pellets which were lodged in the ceiling of the boat. Gladstone is now calling for better policing of the Berbice River.
He said his home at Sandhills is 35 miles from New Amsterdam and has no Police outpost. The nearest Police outpost to New Amsterdam is situated at Aroaima, which is 150 miles up the river.
Two men had, in June last year, robbed another vessel which operated as a mobile shop along the Berbice River. On that occasion, the men had pulled up with a paddle boat and had boarded the MV RS3, where they robbed Frank Collins of a quantity of articles, most of which were school items which he was going to sell ahead on the reopening on school for the new academic year.
That incident took place at the New Amsterdam Market wharf, and the Police have, to date, not been able to apprehend anyone for that robbery. (Andrew Carmichael)
