-two suspects in custody
Three bandits, armed with a gun and two cutlasses terrorized and robbed a family of St. Magdalene Street, New Amsterdam around 4 am yesterday and made off with some $1.8M in cash and gold jewellery.
Two suspects have since been taken into custody and are assisting with investigations. The bandits first pounced on Seeram called ‘Motie,’
53, as he was about to leave home to make purchases at the Port Mourant market.
Seeram and his wife, Cheetranie Tularam, 48, both fish vendors at the New Amsterdam market said they “work hard” and were distressed over their loss.
The man said the bandits braced him to the fence and asked him for money. He responded that he had no money and they gun-butted his left ear and also lashed him about his back.
One held him at gunpoint for about 15 minutes while his accomplices ran upstairs and grabbed his wife and took her into the house.
They demanded that she handed over the money but she told them she did not have any and started screaming.
Before that, she said, she had just closed the door after her husband left when she heard “a lash.” She said she reopened the door and saw him lying on the ground and started to scream.
Her daughter, Yogwattie “Angela” Pitam who has a newborn baby heard her screams and ran out of her bedroom and begged the bandits not to hurt her mother.
They then cuffed Pitam on her face, causing her nose to bleed and on her stomach even as she pleaded with them not to hurt her because she had given birth only nine days ago by caesarean.
Tularam, who could not bear to see her daughter being battered then told a 16-year-old relative who was there at the time, to bring out the bag that contained the jewellery and local and foreign currency.
In tears, the distressed Tularam told reporters that if her daughter had not come out, she would not have given anything to the bandits and that “they woulda have to kill me…”
She said too that “me work too hard; nobody don’t give me anything.
They [bandits] didn’t work for it and give me but dem come fuh pick it up.”
The woman who started the fish business since she was 14-years-old said the bandits threatened to kill her daughter and her “only son” if she [Tularam] tries to identify them.
