Trinidad: Missing taxi driver found murdered

(Trinidad Guardian) When news came in late on Sun­day night that PH dri­ver Ru Seecha­ran’s body was found, the fam­i­ly was in a state of shock, but in par­tic­u­lar, his 87-year-old moth­er Cha­naradai Seecha­ran was dev­as­tat­ed.

Yesterday at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre, his sib­lings ad­mit­ted they with­held the fact that he was mur­dered from her.

“(She is not do­ing) very well, but we did not tell her all the de­tails. All we told her is he went out to work. Some­times he does ex­tra car ser­vice and stuff, de­liv­er­ing cus­tomers. We just tell her that he just went to work and some­thing just take place and he not well, he died,” his sis­ter Sav­it­ri Ram­s­ingh told re­porters at the fa­cil­i­ty at Fed­er­a­tion Park.

An au­top­sy re­port con­firmed that Seecha­ran, al­so known as Ma­ha Rishi, was killed due to a blow to the top of the head.

Seecha­ran, 41, was the youngest of her 10 chil­dren. He was his 87-year-old moth­er’s care­tak­er at their Cal­cut­ta Road #1, McBean Vil­lage, Cou­va home. He al­so took care of his old­er broth­er who al­so lived there.

Seecha­ran’s body was spot­ted by a passer­by in a ravine along the Con­nec­tor Road in Carlsen Field, at around 10 pm on Sun­day.

He was ly­ing face down in the wa­ter with his pants pulled be­low his waist, when he was re­moved from the wa­ter, in­ves­ti­ga­tors found that his hands were tied in front of his body. His iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card was found in the bush­es a short dis­tance away.

Seecha­ran’s sil­ver car was lat­er found crashed along the Solomon Ho­choy High­way in Chase Vil­lage.

It was im­pound­ed for a foren­sic analy­sis. So far, no one has been held as in­ves­ti­ga­tors sus­pect that he was killed af­ter be­ing robbed. Rel­a­tives said he was found wear­ing dif­fer­ent clothes to what he had been wear­ing when they last saw him on May 31. His sis­ters said when they last heard from him, he told them he was in Ch­agua­nas.

Ram­s­ingh ad­mit­ted she be­came alarmed when she vis­it­ed the fam­i­ly home on Sun­day, and her broth­er told her he had not seen him for two days.

His rel­a­tives had lit­tle idea why he would have been mur­dered.

He was de­scribed as one of the most self­less per­sons they knew.

“He was a very nice lov­ing broth­er I had he was some­one very close to me. Every day he would bring my lunch for me. If any­one asks any favour he would do it for them. He was very very nice to us,” said his sis­ter Meera Ma­haraj, “He wasn’t work­ing any­where, he was liv­ing with his mom home. He would see about his mom and he use to work his car some­times. He was very nice to us. Any per­son asks him any ques­tion he’d an­swer it, he’ll do (any) favour. If you ask him to buy this thing he’ll go and buy it.”

His nephew Ra­jesh Seecha­ran said yes­ter­day that he would al­so sell toys and cloth­ing from his car when­ev­er he was not work­ing his taxi. Ra­jesh said his un­cle most­ly did char­ter trips, but could not say whether some­one re­quest­ed his ser­vice on Fri­day.

The last the fam­i­ly heard was that he was seen in the Ch­agua­nas area. It was not like him to go out and not re­turn so when 24 hours had passed, rel­a­tives made a re­port to po­lice around noon Sun­day.

Ra­jesh said his un­cle did not have en­e­mies and did not tell rel­a­tives about any­one threat­en­ing him. The on­ly mo­tive he could spec­u­late came from his un­cle’s hob­by of play­ing amuse­ment casi­no games at bars.

“The on­ly thing I can think is if he stopped by a bar and played a lit­tle game. I don’t know if he won and some­one saw and want­ed his mon­ey. It is the on­ly thing I can think about,” Ra­jesh said.