An overseas-based Guyanese businessman was fatally stabbed at the home he shared with his mother in Alness, Corentyne, early Saturday morning after three masked bandits broke into the house and escaped with an undisclosed sum.
Now deceased is Paul Hardeo, 46, a married father of two who lived in the United States, and who operated a furniture establishment, a trucking service, a construction company and a paint retail outlet in the Corentyne. Hardeo had returned to Guyana last Thursday following a request by his mother, Stella Hardeo, 61, to resolve a land dispute which she had found difficulty dealing with.
Speaking to Stabroek News yesterday, Hardeo’s cousin, Leila Ramdia, recounting the incident said that she had been asleep when at about 1:30 am on Saturday she had been awakened by the bandits whose faces had been covered with paint to conceal their identities. They had stormed the house, she said, and then went straight into Hardeo’s room. She said that Hardeo had been asleep, but that the men had woken him up and demanded that he hand over his money and personal belongings.
“He didn’t give them anything and he pick up a chair and run them out of the room.” She said that he had chased them, even although they had stabbed him more than three times on various parts of his body.
Ramdia went on to relate that the men had then run into the bedroom where Hardeo’s mother was sleeping, had placed a knife to her neck and then had seized her purse and a cellular phone.
Despite his wounds Hardeo had continued in his pursuit of the bandits, following them onto the verandah where they had stabbed him in the chest. It was after this final wound that he had collapsed. Ramdia said that after her cousin fell she had raised the alarm, but got no response. The men then “jumped down the verandah and escaped,” she said.
She explained that the bandits had entered the home through the verandah, by breaking a lock on the iron grill-work. The two-storey, wood and concrete house has four bedrooms, and Hardeo had been occupying the last one at the rear of the house. Ramdia described him as a short, well-built man who had spent a lot of his time engaged in business and looking after his family overseas.
Hardeo was married to Kamal Hardeo, a union which had produced two children, Naudia 19 and Nicholas 21. Ramdia told this newspaper that both children were in college, and that her cousin had visited Guyana regularly to check on his business and his mother. He was well known in the community, she said, and had managed the business since his father’s death. Hardeo had been expected to spend seven days in the country.
Meanwhile, police from the Whim Police Station have since held persons in connection with the incident as investigations continue.
