Security will be reviewed at post offices countrywide, following break-ins at several such facilities, including a $5.7M heist at the Beterverwagting Post Office on Tuesday.
Chairman of the Board of the Guyana Post Office Corporation (GPOC) Juan Edghill yesterday admitted to lapses in security and said internal investigations have been launched and action will be taken against those culpable. The BV heist is the biggest ever experienced by the GPOC and police said the perpetrators have not been caught.
Unknown persons escaped with over $5.7M and $29 in stamps after torching a safe at the Beterverwagting post office. The incident followed a break in at the Clonbrook Post Office, also located on the East Coast of Demerara, over the weekend, where attempts were also made to torch a safe. The perpetrators left empty handed. No security officers were in place at the two buildings.
“I am not going to hide the fact that while we are aware that the post office has been under threat as it relates to security, as Chairman of the Board, I am admitting enough was not done to safeguard the assets of the State”, Edghill told reporters at a press conference yesterday. There is “no justifiable reason why having been under threat as of Sunday where the safe at Clonbrook was attempted to be torched, that money to this value was left at this location,” he added.
He said that this practice is not in keeping with the instructions that have been communicated to the management as part of the GPOC’s security mechanisms. The last time a safe was torched, on the East Coast, he said, was at Mahaica and just about half a million dollars was taken, “half a million dollars too much because not one dime should have been lost.”
According to the GPOC Chairman, the entity has spent more than has been budgeted for on security arrangements and is now faced with a new phenomenon of persons cutting safes. This, he said, is a new dimension that needs to be looked at. Following the latest break-in, the Chairman said he met with senior management and security people and “I did not have very favourable comments to make and there will be a review of security arrangements and maybe personnel that is still not adequate.”
Recently, the GPOC’s management team was at a retreat and security was one of the issues that were addressed. “This is why this robbery is so painful,” Edghill said, noting that the GPOC will accept all the help it can get and that they will not sit and cast blame since something is definitely wrong and must be corrected.
Pension payments
Among the new security measures to be implemented is a change in the time pensioners will be paid. While pensioners will be inconvenienced this change is necessary, Edghill said. “They will have to start making payments to facilitate new security arrangements at a later time in the day perhaps, 8 or 9 am. While some of my elders, might suffer an inconvenience of not being able to access money as early at 7 in the morning, I am making an appeal that it is an arrangement that will have to go into effect immediately,” he said.
He stressed that there will be other new security mechanisms which would allow for different approaches. “There will be inconvenience…. Having money there [at Post Offices] for 7 in the morning puts us as a security risk,” he said.
Edghill said that an announcement regarding the time change for pension payments will be made shortly but first there has to be discussions with the union.
Meantime, while no one has been interdicted from duty in relation to the BV incident, Edghill said that when the investigation has been concluded all the necessary action will be taken. He later noted that the penalty for those found guilty would be more than just interdiction but could not say what that action will be.
Every person involved in the decision to leave the money in the safe, from the post master to the area manager, will be subject to investigation, Edghill noted even as he questioned why such a large amount of cash was left there, particularly following the Clonbrook break-in.
Edghill noted that torching a post office safe entails a tremendous amount of planning, intelligence gathering and collaboration and would have been carried out by experienced persons. “Cutting a safe is not a five minute job. This is not just a crime of opportunity, this is planning… skilled people had to have been employed to get that job done,” he said, adding that the safes the GPOC have are some of the best in the country. While neither the BV nor the Clonbrook post offices have security guards, Edghill said that the locations would be visited by post office patrols.
He appealed to the public to assist in detecting break-ins. “The post offices are all embedded within communities and as Chairman I need to say to all Guyanese, we have to help in this situation, we have to do better than we are doing…. Security is not just the police, the security guards, burglar alarm, lights and all the other paraphernalia that people may want to recommend. It also had to do with communities, understanding that they have a role to play,” he commented.
Edghill noted that the perpetrators of the BV incident would have spent hours cutting away at the safe, which would cause a lot of noise and a light would be emanating from the site. To get into the BV location, he explained, the perpetrators first had to cut through metal grilles and then break down a door which was dead bolted from the inside.
“A vehicle had to bring these tanks and welding equipment. A vehicle had to move it…somebody had to see something. I can’t take the approach that this is just something that happened and nobody don’t know,” he noted.
Any member of the public willing to provide information can contact the post master on 227 7494 (his direct line) or through his secretary on 226 9386.
