The Venezulean authorities are yet to submit a report on the shooting to death of Guyanese Parsaram Persaud allegedly by members of the Venezulean army at Eteringbang on October 6.
Last week Guyana’s Ambassador to Venezuela, Dr Odeen Ishmael, said they were still awaiting word from the authorities on the promised investigation into the incident. In December last year after the embassy had received no word from the authorities in Caracas the ambassador had written the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs requesting a meeting to discuss the issue.
The ambassador said that they had received a letter acknowledging receipt of the request, but were still awaiting a date for the meeting. He also said that they were investigating reports that the soldiers who may have been involved in the shooting had since been released from custody.
And while the police in their initial release on the incident had stated that Persaud had been smuggling fuel when he was shot, his relatives had strenuously denied this, maintaining that he had been legitimately transporting fuel.
They said he worked with his uncle who owned a gold mine and that at the time of the shooting he and a Venezuelan man had been transporting fuel to the dredge. They also claimed that relatives had produced papers to show that the fuel had been obtained legally.
Persaud’s reputed wife, twenty-year-old Carmen Sifontes, a Venezuelan who was in Guyana after his death, had told this newspaper she wanted the man who killed her husband “to go to jail.” Sifontes has a two-year-old daughter, Brittney, for the man, and he was also the father of two other children from a previous relationship – Ramesh, 10, and Darshanie, 8 – both of whom reside at Mahaicony.
