Three armed, masked gunmen raided a home at Gangaram, East Canje around 8.40 pm on Sunday and made off with a small quantity of cash and jewellery after terrorizing occupants.
The bandits beat Ramdat Basant and his wife Kalewattie, who operate a liquor restaurant and grocery store and carted off the day’s sales. They also stole two handbags containing salaries belonging to the couple’s children.
The couple had to undergo treatment at the New Amsterdam Hospital. Kalewattie received stitches above her eyes, while an x-ray proved that Basant suffered a fractured nose.
According to Basant, he was in the lower flat of the building with their son Hemchand when two bandits armed with guns barged through an open door and demanded money and gold jewellery. The third bandit, who was armed with a cutlass, kept watch in the yard.
The couple’s daughter Baigwattie, 24, was sitting under the house solving a crossword puzzle when the men arrived. They grabbed her and forced her into the house while ripping a silver band off her wrist. She was too traumatized to speak to this newspaper yesterday.
Basant said he had just closed up his business and was watching television when he heard his daughter screaming.
But before he could go to see what was wrong, the bandits entered the house and ordered him, Baigwattie and Hemchand to lie on the floor.
At that moment, Kalewattie came out of a room and one of the bandits immediately hit her in the face with the gun butt. Her children started screaming when they saw this and when she tried to grab her daughter close to her the bandit hit her again.
The two men also hit Basant on his nose. They then took him upstairs, where they kicked him in the face. He said his nose began to bleed then. The men then proceeded to ransack two of the three bedrooms and only left after the neighbours realised what was happening and ran out shouting “thief, thief”. As they left, the men fired two shots which broke the lights under the house.
Another daughter, Darshani, 25, had just gone upstairs to take a shower when she heard the commotion downstairs. She told Stabroek News she heard the dogs barking followed by screams coming from her family downstairs.
She said she realized it was bandits and was about to escape through the back door to get help, but the breeze slammed the door shut. She then ran for the telephone and tried to make calls but could not get through to anyone.
Though she was shaking terribly, she said, she wanted to go downstairs to see what was taking place. But she decided against it after she heard the bandits beating her family and hid under the bed in one of the bedrooms instead. Luckily, that was the room the men did not enter. She said the men had cut the television antenna wire probably thinking that it was for the telephone.
This is not the first time the family was robbed. More than ten years ago bandits robbed the family of a large amount of jewellery. Kalewattie was also badly beaten on that occasion. Darshani said because of that robbery they no longer have a lot of jewellery.
