In a daring daylight robbery yesterday, three gunmen attacked a Berbice couple outside a hardware store at Barrack Street, Kingston.
The unmasked men, who had been waiting outside in a white car PNN 515, pounced on lumber yard owner Nazeela Khadin-Sukhdeo and her husband Mahendra Raymond Sukhdeo when they exited the store. The perpetrators then relieved the couple of a black haversack containing about $400,000, inclusive of a quantity of US currency, and their identification and bank documents. However, one of the perpetrators left a fingerprint behind on the Sukhdeos’ vehicle.
Khadin-Sukhdeo, speaking to this newspaper last night, said that she and her spouse had been in Georgetown since about 9am yesterday and she believes that they were trailed through the city by the gunmen. The woman explained that they usually came to the city about twice a month to conduct business and buy stock.
When they arrived in Georgetown, Khadin-Sukhdeo recounted, a Camp Street bank was their first stop and then they travelled to a city business to order and pay for a quantity of goods. It was from the business place that they went to the Barrack Street hardware store.
“I went inside and paid for a quantity of goods and collected it,” she recalled, “and then me and my husband walked out the store. We had a lot of bags with us so we went to the trunk first and put the things in there and then we went to our respective side of the vehicle.”
The woman said that she was standing just outside the passenger door when she heard a man ask her for the key to the vehicle. Immediately after, Khadin-Sukhdeo said, the man grabbed the black haversack which had been left inside the vehicle. It was the same bag, she explained, that she had used at the bank.
“I had my hand bag on me so I drop it and kick it under the vehicle but he point the gun at me right between my eyes and then he bend down and pick up the bag…at first I struggled a bit when he was walking away with the bag but then he turn back and point the gun at me and I just tell him take it and go and just don’t do us anything.”
One of the robbers, she recounted, also tried to snatch a gold chain her husband was wearing. However, the chain fell and the man did not bother to turn around for it.
The woman said that the three men were dressed casually, wore no masks and looked like “any other unsuspicious person in Georgetown.” The entire attack, according to her, lasted just a few minutes. “There were people around us on the street when we were being robbed and this one woman kept screaming for “thief, thief” after she saw what was happening to us,” Khadin-Sukhdeo said.
She said that she later learnt that the men were about the break into her vehicle to steal the bag but she and her husband exited the hardware store before they could conclude this act. “So they see us and decide to stick us up instead,” she said.
Immediately after the men drove off in the white car, Khadin-Sukhdeo said, she tried twice to call the police emergency line 911. However, she said the phone just kept ringing. Employees at the hardware store, she said, were eventually successful in contacting police.
The owner of the hardware store, she further reported, subsequently escorted them to the Brickdam Police Station.
It was discovered there that one of the perpetrators had left a finger print behind on their vehicle, Khadin-Sukhdeo said, and as a result she had to visit Police Headquarters, Eve Leary so they could deal with it. “My driver’s licence was in the bag those men stole and I am trying to get a replacement from police as soon as possible…I am a business woman and I also drive my own heavy duty trucks to deliver lumber, so I need to have my licence,” she said.
