It is too early to know the full context in which the grenade explosion took place in Stabroek Market on Wednesday. The one thing that can be said with certainty at this stage is that according to the police the fragmentation grenade was not lobbed into the crowd. This is good news as far as it goes, but that is not really very far. After all, what was a grenade doing in Stabroek Market at all? Where did it come from? Who brought it there? It isn’t as if it is the kind of thing anyone carries around in their pocket, and then drops on the ground accidentally forgetting all about it.
The police have suggested that given his injuries, the unfortunate ‘American’ had the grenade in his hand when it exploded. Does that mean he saw it on the ground when he was sweeping the stall and picked it up out of curiosity without recognizing the danger? Or had he collected it from someone earlier? Or alternatively, had someone instructed him to retrieve it from the stall? As we reported in our edition on Thursday, the first and third of these theses found credence with persons at the scene, one eyewitness telling this newspaper that ‘American’ found the grenade when he was cleaning and then started to “fingle” with it.
A woman vendor said she had seen ‘American’ with something in his hands, and that shortly before the explosion he had made a jerking movement. If accurate, this could be interpreted to mean that she actually saw him pull the pin, although it might be noted that the police have said so far no pin or lever has been found at the scene. Since he must have pulled the pin at some point for the grenade to explode, however, did he have any idea about what he was doing at that moment, or did he know and did it nonetheless? If the last mentioned (which seems unlikely), it would bring a whole new dimension into the story. Is it even possible (albeit also unlikely) that he did not understand how the device worked, and had been told by someone with malevolent intentions to pull the pin?
It was what the female vendor went on to say which arguably lends some support to thesis number three. This newspaper on Thursday reported her as saying, “Some bus boys tell me that lil before he [‘American’] go and pick up the thing in the stall area he been talking to some strange man and the man give he a lil change.” However, even if that is true (and it is at best second-hand information), it still would not tell us whether ‘American’ and the man were talking about the grenade, and that the ‘lil change’ he was given related to its retrieval. If it did, then when exactly was the explosive device placed in the stall, since the supplier would not have wanted it discovered in error by an ordinary citizen, and the longer it was there, the greater the likelihood of discovery.
And if someone did leave it there with the intention of having it transported somewhere else via an intermediary, it must have been in a bag or some kind of container; no one would openly place a grenade on the ground where they could be spotted doing so, and where it might be seen subsequently. So again, as mentioned earlier, either ‘American’ encountered the container when cleaning and looked in it to see if there was anything he would find useful, or he was sent specifically to collect the container which was then to be passed to a third party. If the latter, then perhaps he exceeded his instructions when he lifted the grenade out.
Possibly contradicting the story of ‘American’s’ conversation with some “strange man” are the statements of Orin, who does odd jobs around the market, and who told our reporter that he and ‘American’ slept the previous night in a stall opposite where the explosion occurred. When the owner of the latter stall arrived in the morning, Orin woke ‘American’ up, and he went over to start cleaning. It is always possible, of course, that ‘American’ could have spoken to a “strange man” subsequent to that when Orin was not around.
It was Commissioner of Police Henry Greene at a press conference on Wednesday evening who advanced the hypothesis that ‘American’ was a courier of illegal arms and “other substances.”Subsequently in our Friday edition we also reported sources as saying that ‘American’ worked as a messenger/delivery man for the suppliers of grenades. If that is so, then one would have thought he would have been familiar with the handling of these explosives, and would not have been “fingling” it in the way one eyewitness described.
On Friday we did report Acting Commissioner Seelall Persaud as pointing to the discovery of several of these grenades in the past by the joint services, including the one found in the ammunition cache at the time of Colin Jones’s arrest last year. Mr Persaud was not forthcoming about exactly how many grenades we might be talking about, or the precise time period during which they were found. That apart, one source did tell this newspaper that the fragments which the police located in the market indicated it was an M9 High-explosive Dual-purpose grenade; the army uses the M76 grenade, we were told, seemingly ruling out a local provenance for these unwelcome items.
Whether or not ‘American’ was a courier of arms and explosives, there are several more troubling questions which arise. If the source is not local, where are the grenades coming from and who is bringing them into the country? Most important, to whom are they going and for what purpose? Where the first of these questions is concerned, our Friday report cited unnamed sources with security knowledge as saying that they were probably coming from Brazil, and that there was a local supplier for this type of explosive. Some years ago Commissioner Greene had said that most of the Taurus pistols which were in Guyana illegally had originated in Brazil, so now it seems, grenades are being added to the list of dangerous imports from the south. All of this raises again the question of the permeability of our borders which makes it possible for criminal elements to bring in arms, ammunition and explosives, among other things, with impunity. If the authorities cannot control the situation now, imagine what it will be like when an all-weather road to Brazil is completed; will the local criminals then acquire a degree of firepower to make law and order impossible?
As for who the recipients of the grenades are, as noted above, the Crime Chief was very reticent on this subject. However, one gets the impression that the purchasers are possibly varied, in the sense that there is not a single buyer. This would not rule out the possibility of course, that one (or more) of the buyers was harbouring more sinister motives than plain old-fashioned crime. Whatever the case, one can only observe that the weaponry some modern criminals have acccumulated is more like a war arsenal than the tools of the trade of the traditional robber. If nothing else, Stabroek Market has jerked us into the recognition that in some parts of the country citizens sometimes have a sense of living in the equivalent of a war zone.
And then there are the middlemen in this pernicious trade, of whom it is now claimed ‘American’ might have been one. At Wednesday’s press conference Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee held forth on the matter of the big market being a hub of criminal activity, while the Commissioner said the police had intensified their work there in recent months, which had stymied some of the illegal pursuits. One cannot help but feel, however, that if they suspected the market was a location for any kind of trade in ammunition and the renting of guns, they should have devised a major undercover operation to establish precisely what the links in the supply chain were, and who exactly was involved. If ‘American’ had indeed been identified as one of the links at an earlier stage, this whole story might conceivably have had an altogether different ending.
