Speaking at a press conference at the Office of the President Jagdeo strongly condemned the gun and channa bomb attacks on two police stations, the High Court and a secondary school. He warned that his administration would not be brought down by such acts, stating that those who may be of such belief live in a different era.
Jagdeo also called for the same level of condemnation he has seen directed at the horrific torture of a teenager by policemen to be aimed at the recent attacks.
“We will go after them with all the vigour and we will get these people. The security forces will have to go out and look for them and find them. They are not ordinary criminals, they operate with high-powered weapons,” the President said last evening.
He said the criminals not only have local masterminds but there is also a “foreign terrorist mastermind” who lives in the US who was also implicated in the ministry fire through calls made to that person’s number by one of the persons implicated in the fire before and after the incident.
According to the head of state, it was not the first time this number has surfaced in connection with local criminal acts since it had showed up in the past in connection with the Buxton criminals. He said government had approached the US for assistance in finding this person, “because obviously this person has been masterminding terrorist acts in Guyana.”
The President also announced that two weeks ago he met US officials and urged them to hand over information about convicted drug trafficker Roger Khan, the infamous spy equipment and on this terrorist mastermind “as soon as possible.
“I also said to them, can you imagine if a Guyanese, someone here in Guyana had made a call to the US to someone just before he burnt a federal building in the United States of America what kind of pressure we would be under here in Guyana to find the person and deliver him to them. In fact there would a storm of FBI agents coming here.”
The President questioned why if the two countries are in a “partnership to fight terrorism and we talk about a symmetrical sharing of information” Guyana can’t get the information it seeks. The President said that at the meeting two weeks ago he expressed fear that the criminals would strike again since two of the persons implicated in the fire escaped from police custody.
“So I expressed this fear that if they did it once and there is this mastermind abroad then it could happen again. Well it did, the same people struck again,” Jagdeo said.
It was at this point that he called for civil society and members of the opposition to offer the same condemnation as they did in relation to the torture allegations as the attacks are as important as the allegations.
“I don’t see the same level of condemnation and those who urge international and independent audits or probes should also call for international cooperation in this regard. But they are very silent on some of these things; we cannot have double standards in this society. It seems as though only things they perceive could damage the image of the country they have this strident position against.”
He called on the Private Sector Commission, which on Tuesday urged an independent inquiry into the torture allegations, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), the Guyana Bar Association and all of the other organisations that condemned the torture incident to call on the US government “to find this foreign mastermind who has been generating terror in our society…”
‘Poised for a take off’
Asked by a journalist to “hazard a guess” as to what could have prompted the recent attacks and the Health Ministry fire since they “seemed to be” political attacks on his government, the President said: “You are not going to bring down the government by shooting up some policemen or burning a couple of ministries. I think it [the attacks} is designed to spread terror in the society just when our society is poised for a take off.”
According to the President he has seen many attempts such as protests to create trouble and attempts to mislead people. He then said that he had seen the transcript of a “horrible programme” on Channel Nine sent to him by Advisory Committee on Broadcasting (ACB) which spouted racism.
“But this is not going to bring the government down. I think those who think that they can do this they suffer from, they are living in a time warp. Democracy is firmly entrenched in this country. You have to win elections to do that,” Jagdeo said.
He said he thinks the acts are aimed at damaging the “developmental aspects of out country” as if time has to be spent on rebuilding destroyed buildings or people are worried, then they would have served their purpose.
“But we are going to get to them, nothing lasts forever,” the President said. Many thought the Buxton gang would have been forever, he said, but in the final analysis they “ran away” when the security forces went behind them.
He said some opposition persons are living “in a different era” such as the time when Guyana did not have any democracy when a “kind of arrogance developed among the political class at that time – they had a divine right to political power…”
He said this is a different and open era with a free press. But many still live in that era and they become “more and more bitter and you see the bitterness everyday in their letters and their statements to the newspapers and they think they can turn history back but that’s not going to happen.”
