Bandits in Guyana target bank customers and other Guyana Warning Or Danger Tips

Bandits in Guyana target bank customers
Thursday, May 25, 2006

by Gordon French
Caribbean Net News Guyana Correspondent
Email: gordon@caribbeannetnews.com

GEORGETOWN, Guyana: Police in Guyana have alerted the public to a new risk of bandits, using great skill and communication, trailing customers who have conducted transactions at commercial banks in the country's capital, Georgetown.

"The bandits are operating in teams using motor cars or motor cycles and persons should be alert to their being followed by such persons. In some instances persons are followed having left the bank and in other instances the perpetrators plant themselves in the bank and alert their accomplices outside with the use of cell phones," a police press statement said.

Earlier this week, police in Georgetown were investigating two incidents that occurred where customers who had conducted business transactions with banking institutions were later attacked and robbed by armed men who tracked them with motor vehicles.

The police have advised the public to exercise caution when going about their business, having withdrawn from or proceeding to banks with large sums of money.

"Currently the police have both overt and covert operations around all banks. The most recent operation resulted in two men being caught outside the National Bank of Industry and Commerce (NBIC) bank last Friday, one of whom was armed with a firearm. These operations will continue," the police stated.

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Drug trade is squeezed to Guyana, with its lax borders the Takatu River
is so slender a border between Guyana and Brazil that speedboat taxis skim
across it in a minute. In the dry season, villagers ford it by jeep or
even on foot.

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Clearly, the Guyana taxi industry lives by two codes
"we'll get you there - dead or alive" and "we'll brake when we hit
something". As a passenger you're just shrapnel from a flyingbullet.

It doesn't matter which route you take. For tourists there are only
two rules:
1) get in the vehicle quickly or it will take off without y! ou, as one of
our colleagues who had his foot driven over can attest, and 2) pray - pray
really hard. Pray that you don't hit something, pray that your last meal
has been well digested and pray that your estate
back home is in order.

Traffic in Guyana is more like random, totally senseless manoeuvres by
heaps of rusty metal and horse-drawn carriages. There are four-way stops,
but they're more like a game of chicken: he who dares, crosses first. There
are no road signs, there are no lanes. Rumour has it that there is a set of
traffic lights in town, but it's an unconfirmed
sighting.

In Guyana if your vehicle doesn't have a hooter or bright lights, it's
completely useless, because they are essential for survival out here.You
hoot when you take off, you flick your lights and hoot when you overtake,
you hoot when you turn and you hoot when you cross an intersection. When
you have no intention of stopping at an intersection,
as one! 5-ton truck driver did the other day, you hoot louder and for
longer. Hooting is such a reflex action here that some drivers do it for no
reason at all.

Bob Marley singing "Don't worry, about a thing .." playing on the radio
does nothing to ease my nerves. One taxi driver removed his taxi signs from
his car doors when we
got in.They were big fridge-magnet-type signs that I never knew existed.
The
reason he removed them, he said, was "Becos we goin' true a roff area, and
if dey see I got toorists, dem might do sumting". It seemed perfectly
plausible for me to then say: "So let's not go through the rough area
then"- he looked at me as if I had cursed his mother.

At night the "rule" is simple: put your brights on, move into the oncoming
lane, hoot and overtake.

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Politically unstable. As a tourist be on the lookout.

Today's Guyanese are few - only about 700,000 - but they are richly diverse, descendants of East Indians, Africans, native Amer-Indians, Chinese, and Europeans. They speak English and worship in Christian churches and Hindu temples and Islamic mosques.

Yet if this place is known at all from the outside, it is often, still, for Jim Jones, the deadly Kool-Aid, and that day in 1978 when some 900 people died in a remote village near the border with Venezuela.

Despite living on the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Suriname, Brazil, and Venezuela, Guyanese consider themselves Caribbean. And once a year everything stops, in the daytime at least, for cricket

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Reporters held at gunpoint in Guyana
Published on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Email To Friend Print Version

Reporters held at gunpoint in Guyana
Published on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Email To Friend Print Version

By Gordon French
Caribbean Net News Guyana Correspondent
Email: gordon@caribbeannetnews.com

GEORGETOWN, Guyana: For the third time in less than five years, Guyana’s leading newspaper, Kaieteur News, came under attack from gunmen. According to police, two men invaded the editorial department shortly after noon on Friday and held several reporters at gunpoint including, Editor-in-Chief, Adam Harris.

The Guyana Government and the Guyana Press Association (GPA) have since condemned the attack.

A police press statement noted that no one was harmed in the ordeal which lasted some three minutes, but that the target appeared to be the newspaper’s publisher, Glenn Lall, who was in the United States at the time. However, in the aftermath of the attack, several reporters were traumatized and had to be consoled and efforts were being made to beef-up security at the premises.

According to reports, the two men entered the building located on the outskirts of the capital, Georgetown, seeking Lall’s whereabouts. After being told that Lall was unavailable, the two men then whipped out handguns and ordered staffers to lie on the floor, while holding a gun to a reporter’s head. The men later fled on foot.

Kaieteur News was attacked on two previous occasions.

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