Pandemonium reigned on Friday at the Yarakita Primary School in the Mabaruma Sub-Region when a party of heavily armed policemen forced a dozen young men from the community to strip naked in
According to a teacher at the Region One school, on Thursday evening several men who work in the goldfields across the Venezuelan border were robbed by four armed men as they walked along the trail which led to the goldfields in the Polvo de Oro area and which is frequented by Guyanese miners. The robbery occurred some three miles away from the Amerindian community.
Several attempts to reach senior police officials for a comment yesterday were futile.
The teacher said that the victims, who were robbed of an undisclosed amount of gold, reported the matter to the police station at Mabaruma the next day and around midday on Friday, the police arrived at the remote community by bus.
According to the teacher, the police officers “locked off” the area and later arrested the young men, some of whom are school aged and lined them up in front of the school. “Imagine is midday …in fact was about 1pm and school just call when the police took these young men and put them to stand in front the school and aiming the guns at them”.
According to the woman, the police interrogated the men regarding the robbery while accusing them of creating insecurity in the area. She said that in full view of the entire school population, a resident of the community approached the police and asked that they, “desist from exposing these things to the children”.
She said that one of the officers verbally abused another resident using a series of expletives when he inquired what was happening.
“The police aimed the guns at these men and forced them to strip naked”, the woman added.
She said that as the episode played out, school children started to cry. She said that an hour later, the officers handcuffed the young men and took them out of the community to the police station at Mabaruma.
She said that over the weekend, relatives were told that the men would be released on station bail and according to her, yesterday the men were granted bail each in the sum of $100,000.
A source in the region said that the young men were released later yesterday after the police could not find anything linking them to the robbery.
Residents of Yarakita last evening noted that the incident has left the entire community in a traumatized state and they are calling on the Home Affairs Ministry as well as the Police Complaints Authority to address the matter.
