The savage attack on the Bartica community on Sunday night has left security officials reeling and there has been no statement by the police on who might have been behind it.
Using speedboats around 20 gunmen on Sunday night stormed the southwestern township of Bartica, located some 80 miles from Georgetown. When they left, by the same means, 12 people lay dead and seven others wounded.
In its first statement since the Sunday night incident, the joint services said yesterday evening that several teams of law enforcement officials had been dispatched to the area and are conducting security operations and investigations.
A top official in the security forces told Stabroek News yesterday that the attack might have been a collaborative well-executed plan by foreign criminals aided by their Guyanese counterparts. According to the official, who asked not to be named, the scale and manner of the slaughter seemed to be more than criminality, and there might be a bigger motive behind it.
Declared war
Meanwhile, Brigadier (Rtd) David Granger told Stabroek News in an interview yesterday that the gunmen who carried out the mass killings at Bartica seemed to have declared war against +
the state’s security. He blamed the mayhem on the lack of a comprehensive national security plan to address deteriorating crime, which started seven years ago.
Hundreds of Barticians yesterday stood at street corners lamenting the brutish slaughter on Sunday night. There has been no major policy statement by the Bharrat Jagdeo administration, although the Government Information Agency has announced that Jagdeo would be meeting with stakeholders on Tuesday. (See page 3) There have also been calls for the administration to declare a limited state of emergency.
Since the notorious 2002 prison break, which ushered in a crime wave never experienced in this country before, security here has deteriorated rapidly and despite numerous calls from political and civic groups for the government to implement a national security strategy not much has been done. Over recent years there had been numerous security projects, but Granger said no one-off security project would solve the crime crisis Guyana was now engulfed in.
He said the British three million Pounds sterling project, the Citizens’ Security and the Crime Stoppers programmes were just what they are called – projects and not a plan. “What we need is a plan which would address all the needs of the security forces so that in a crisis like the one in Bartica there would be a professional response based on sound intelligence,” Granger said. Opposition parties had been calling on the administration to implement a security plan, but the government has insisted that the British project was the plan.
Granger said that Sunday night’s mass killings at Bartica and the January 26 murders at Lusignan had further exposed the weaknesses of the security forces. “What we are looking at is a pattern in which heavily-armed gangsters are capable of creating mayhem and are ruining the state,” Granger, a former national security advisor told Stabroek News. According to him the pattern of mass killings did not start at Lusignan, noting that it went back as far as the carnage in Agricola, Eccles and the shooting at Kaieteur News printery.
Noting that to all of these killings the security forces’ response had been dismal, Granger said. “Imagine these men carried out a major attack and until now not one of them had been arrested.”
Granger said that this latest attack demonstrated the serious crisis facing the security forces at present. “They badly lacked intelligence
