A young boy will now lose sight in his left eye after a squib exploded close to his face on Wednesday night.
What was supposed to be a fun Diwali celebration at Supenaam, Essequibo, for 10-year-old Navindra Niranjan ended in horror after the squib was thrown at him.
Marana Peters, Niranjan’s mother, recalled seeing her son fall to the ground, screaming in pain. “I just see he dropped to the ground and start hollering and I rushed to him and hold he and he seh the boy throw it on he and when I start questioning the boy he just start walking away,” she said.
Peters, a vendor, said Niranjan had been on the road with her as she was selling and he asked her for money to buy squibs. After she gave him the money, she warned him not to get any large ones and instead to only use the small ones. “I watch and I see he went to one of the people diya and tried to light a squib and the same time another [boy] was coming from the road end side walking,” she added. After the boy passed her son, he threw a lit squib towards him and it exploded in his face.
Peters explained that after the boy walked away and disappeared, she quizzed several bystanders, who told her that he went around the corner to his mother’s home. She went to the boy’s home, where she told his mother of what her son had done but that only resulted in an argument as the woman expressed her doubt. “She start to argue and act bad and I seh is either we go to the hospital first or the police station and that’s when they decided to take my son to the hospital,” she added.
Peters said her son was subsequently rushed to the hospital, where his face was bandaged and he was given medication. Since the medical centre was not equipped to properly deal with the boy’s injuries, he was then transferred to the Georgetown Public Hospital, where they found out that he would not be able to see again through his left eye.
While Peters and Niranjan’s father, Suresh Niranjan, are happy that their son is alive and the damage is not as bad as it could’ve been, they are appealing to the police force to properly investigate the case to so that the person responsible for harming their son faces the brunt of the law.
