by Michel Outridge
Nadira Harriprashad and her husband Harrilall Boodram
A 38- year old woman was in critical condition at the Intensive Care Unit of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) yesterday after she and her husband were brutalised by three bandits at their Vigilance North, East Coast Demerara home, Thursday night.Nadira Harriprashad was stabbed in the left side of her neck and beaten shortly after 20:30h when she and her fisherman spouse, Harrilall Boodram, 45, were about to close their small grocery.
Handguns
Armed with handguns, the robbers took the couple into the bottom flat of their two-storey wooden house and tortured them for more after being given money and jewellery.
The couple’s 21-year-old daughter, Rosita Boodram said she was upstairs when her parents were attacked but became aware that something was amiss when she heard loud cursing downstairs and she bolted the door to her bedroom and stayed inside. But she came out when the gunmen threatened to kill her mother and father.
Boodram said she hid her three-month old baby girl under the bed and went outside the room where she was confronted by one of the trio demanding cash and jewellery. She said the gunman made her fetch a bag containing the booty and hand it over downstairs where one of his two accomplices was beating her father with a handgun while the other held her mother in the kitchen in a pool of blood.
“I saw him drag my mother up the stairs, she was bleeding profusely and they kept asking for more money and gold,” Boodram told the Guyana Chronicle. She said they took the belt off her father’s pants and tried to strangle him with it and they also pushed a piece of a steel rod into his ears and hit him many times about the head and body with guns.
Boodram said her mother suffered a gaping wound to her left side neck and she almost bled to death as her blood was spattered about the kitchen and other parts of the house, where the stains were still evident yesterday when the Guyana Chronicle visited.
Husband Harrilall Boodram - blood on his pants
Boodram said the bandits compelled her parents to switch off the external lights and Police arrived to see her being taken down the stairs by a bandit with a knife to her neck. She said, by then, her father was trying to carry her injured mother to the gate on the way to hospital after the two other bandits jumped over their back fence to escape the cops.
She said, although Police encountered the bandits in their yard after her father pointed them out, they did go not in pursuit because they were afraid to go into the swampy area behind. She said the ranks even mistook her father for one of the bandits but eventually left the scene without a confrontation.
Boodram said, had the Police engaged the bandits, the latter would have been captured in the swamp full of weeds that would have made their flight to freedom difficult. Fortunately, Boodram said her brother was away at night lessons when the robbery occurred, with the whole house being ransacked.
Friday, April 13, 2007
