Residents of Bath Settlement, West Coast Berbice (WCB) took to the streets in a fiery protest from 4.30 am yesterday in solidarity with the Lusignan residents whose relatives were brutally slain by gunmen early Saturday morning.
By the time the protest ended, six of the protesters and a police detective, had received pellet wounds and were rushed to the Fort Wellington Hospital. Three were immediately referred to the Georgetown Hospital; some persons were beaten and others thrown into police vans and locked up after they refused to disperse.
Those injured were Nazam Alli, 40; Shanchara Silchan, 48; Chatram Phagoo, 22; and Sarju Persaud, 39 all of Bath Settlement; Tyson Vyphuis, 24, of Number Nine Village WCB; Chaman Lall, 52, of Number Eleven Village, WCB and Joel David, a 44-year-old detective attached to the Fort Wellington Police Station. They were picked up and rushed to the Fort Wellington Hospital covered in blood.
Alli, Lall, Silchan and David were transferred to the Georgetown Hospital for further medical attention while the others were treated and sent away.
The protesters who were mainly sugar workers from the Blairmont Estate set two fires and blocked the main thoroughfare near the drainage trench road using trailers, old light poles, pieces of wood, old irons and part of an old truck.
Commuters were left stranded and were forced to walk long distances to get transportation to get to their destinations while many schoolchildren returned home.
Around 12:30 hours after the protestors refused to adhere to the repeated calls from the police to “disperse and go to your lawful place of business; this is illegal,” police fired teargas canisters at the crowd, sending everyone scattering for cover.
A few persons jumped into the trench to “cool off”, while a few men decided to challenge the ranks by picking up the teargas canisters and hurling them right back at the police. The policemen, who were armed with shotguns, then fired at the crowd and their pellets hit the seven persons.
As this was happening, other police officers were busy clearing the road, allowing the traffic to flow freely. A truck with soldiers was the first to blaze through. The ranks quelled the fires with buckets of water from the trench and later used a Bobcat to clear the debris.
Advancing behind shields, the police officers beat some of the protestors with batons after they threatened to block the road again. This resulted in angry comments from residents and the ranks ran into the streets where a crowd was and in a yard and arrested a few men.
The sugar workers claimed that the police were too “violent” and vowed, “we are not taking this”.
When this newspaper visited earlier, the protestors said they were saddened at the way the innocent people from Lusignan were killed and shouted, “We want justice. No justice; no sugar! We want the police to catch ‘Fineman’ then we gon work.”
Another cane harvester shouted, “if they can’t find Fineman, we gon give them we cutlass and leh dem give we dem guns and we gon find him. If they can get $30 million to find one man then wha dem doing with the military
