Police in Berbice are still hunting a man who took a cutlass to his mother-in-law after she upbraided him for beating her daughter.
Kowsilla Singh, called “Geeta,” had her face disfigured when she sustained a slash stretching from her left ear to the corner of her mouth, during the attack on Tuesday, at Yakusari North, Black Bush Polder. She remains a patient at the New Amsterdam Hospital. When Stabroek News contacted her yesterday she was relieved that an x-ray found that she was out of danger.
But Singh is still worried because her attacker, her 27-year-old son-in-law, has still not been caught by the police and she said he would have to pay for his actions. She was also fearful that the man may want to return and hurt her daughter, Nirvanie “Rupa” Dindial, 18, again as he had threatened.
On the day of the attack, she received a call from her daughter who related that her husband had beaten her. She subsequently went over to the house to make peace between the couple. By that time, her daughter had jumped through a window and was hidden among some bushes before going to a neighbour’s house to borrow a phone to make the call.
Singh was about to cross the bridge over a trench to get to the couple’s house when she realized that her son-in-law had ripped out the boards. She then had to walk around to the other street to access the house. By then her daughter, who also has a two-year-old son from a previous union had already returned home. Singh said she went into the house and sat in the hammock with her grandson and she and the man began arguing.
She told him to stop hitting her daughter on her head and the man got mad and replied that “you never give yuh daughter wrong” and threatened to kill them both and to kill himself.
The next thing Singh knew he whipped out the cutlass from under a chair and fired a chop towards her neck. She pulled away and was slashed across her face instead.
He then fired the cutlass at Dindial but she started to scream and begged him to spare her. After he finished chopping Singh, he then blamed his wife for “causing him to do it”.
Stabroek News was told that the attacker sat brazenly in the front seat of the bus the woman’s relatives hired to take her to the hospital and then he disembarked at Rose Hall. Singh’s mother, Rohini Singh, said although they knew her daughter’s attacker was in the bus they did not put him out as they were afraid that he would become violent again.
She said though that the driver should have taken him to the police station instead of dropping him off at Rose Hall when he asked him to.
