The husband of Bridgette Gangadin was released on substantial station bail last evening while police awaited a response on how to proceed from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), a senior police officer said.
The file was taken to the DPP yesterday.
Stabroek News was told that since the 72-hour maximum period for the holding of a suspect without charges elapsed yesterday, the man had to be released.
Gangadin’s mangled remains were found near the Vigilance Police Station on Sunday. Her husband had told the police minutes after his arrest that the woman jumped out of the moving Canter truck they were travelling in and he accidentally ran over her. Relatives have since claimed that he might have pushed her out and then reversed, crushing her head in the process
The man fled the scene of the accident and failed to report the incident to the police. Instead, he returned home and changed vehicles before heading to Enterprise, where he asked to be hidden. He would have passed Gangadin’s body on his way to Enterprise.
Police had said they were investigating the murder of Gangadin whose body was discovered around 2.25 am on the Vigilance Public Road with suspected marks of violence. Gangadin’s mother Punarbattie Bharrat had told Stabroek News that she was not satisfied with the post-mortem examination (PME) which revealed that her head was crushed by a wheel and her skull was fractured. In the light of this, the woman’s relatives are pushing for a new PME by an independent pathologist.
Bharrat told this newspaper yesterday that she visited the office of Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee to discuss the issue but she was told he would not be available until Monday.
This newspaper has since learnt that Minister Rohee is overseas.
An aggrieved Bharrat said that the family cannot wait until then since the woman will be cremated on Saturday. “We got to hold the cremation on Saturday because nuff people come in fuh de funeral and people got to go back to wuk… Ah got to speak to he before then,” the woman said, adding that the family has since retained a lawyer to help push the process faster.
She said that the pathologist who had already been identified will be coming from Trinidad.
The woman had stated that she believed something happened that night and there is more to the story – this is the reason behind her desire for another PME.
The suspect’s parents, who arrived here from the United States, have since admitted that their son was abusive and according to the mother Sheila Gangadin, he had made promises to change. According to Sheila, she and her husband came to Guyana to support the dead woman’s relatives and to take care of the funeral expenses.
The Gangadins also said that they were not there to create conflict; they came in peace and wanted to offer support to the family. They said too that they treated the dead woman as though she was their own daughter.
Gangadin was married to the suspect since the age of 13 and her relatives had recounted 14 years of abuse she suffered at his hands. The man, they said, had even threatened his mother-in-law and other relatives were also fearful of him.
